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Individually addressable laser diode arrays (IABs) have been successfully demonstrated first time in the 90’s. The main commercial success area has been the printing industry and more recently digital press. These laser arrays are typically working at 8xx nm and 9xx nm wavelengths1,2 . Individually addressable laser diode arrays operating in visible region has also been reported3,4. There is an increasing interest in different variants of individual addressable arrays not only in the printing industry & digital press, but also in various display applications including head-up displays and AR/VR products. Recently, novel applications have emerged, for example, in quantum computing and life science. Many applications benefit from tailored lasers that for example in printing meet the surging need for personalized printing materials, labels and packaging driven by eCommerce and constantly increasing need to personalized pharmaceutical packaging. In this work, we report the state-of-the-art high-brightness individually addressable diode laser arrays, that are presenting new possibilities for traditional applications, such as printing, and addressing the new requirements of the novel applications. The single-mode IAB design is scalable from a few individually addressable emitters up to 100 emitters and beyond per array with a highly uniform operation and repeatability and can be applied over the visible red spectrum from 630nm to 690nm or over the mid-infrared spectrum from 790nm to 980nm. Novel and traditional applications have set new requirements for the device density and resolution. Our new flexible individually addressable array designs enable dense device pitching, varying from 20µm to 100µm. This capability enables totally new features and benefits for the applications. Power levels up to 60mW per laser emitter enable high brightness solutions. The IABs show excellent uniformity and stable long-term operation. They are perfectly suited and bringing new capabilities, such as higher resolution, for printing and display applications. Additionally, they are enabling totally new capabilities in quantum computing and life science.
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