Interband & Quantum Cascade Lasers - Technologies, Market Trends and Applications (2021)

This study provides a comprehensive description of the 2021 Cascade Laser market, including market revenue, forecasts, technologies and applications.

Enthusiastic forecasts for the broad adoption of Interband and Quantum Cascade Lasers have not fully materialized in recent years. This market study investigates the current maturity of Cascade Lasers and evaluates their capabilities for further growth in a competitive market environment.

Key Features of the Report

• Revenues of the ICLs and QCLs markets at the level of sources and systems
• Market forecasts up to 2026
• Comprehensive overview of ICL and QCL products and their applications at the level of sources and equipment (excluding THz range)
• Comparison of ICL- and QCL-based equipment with the other competitive systems
• Business models analysis
• Identification of challenges and bottlenecks for the broader adoption of ICLs and QCLs in large volume applications
• Review of the recent application trends (with the focus on gas spectroscopy)
• Review of potentially attractive applications for ICLs and QCLs

Interband and Quantum Cascade Lasers (ICLs and QCLs) offer coherent and high power radiation in the mid-infrared range, which is crucial for infrared countermeasures, high-resolution gas spectroscopy and chemical sensing.

Due to many advantages, Cascade Lasers were expected to mature quickly and to settle in large volume applications. Especially the semiconductor nature of ICLs and QCLs gave hope to make this technology largely scalable and cheap, as it happened with LEDs and VCSELs in the past.

Dynamic growth has not fully materialized in the last few years. The price of lasers still remains high (around a few thousand dollars per piece), and the potentially “killer” applications have yet to arrive. Cascade Lasers can be mainly found in niche applications.

The reason for this lies not only in the technical bottlenecks, but also in the market, which has not been ready to implement CL technology. Customers were very conservative and there were many other competitive techniques to choose from. Now the perspectives for adoption are brighter.

All bottlenecks preventing the wider use of Cascade Laser technologies are deeply discussed in this report. The study provides market forecasts from 2020 to 2026 and also describes all main players to answer the question of whether market disruption can finally occur.