Traditionally nty job has been to organize the Laser Marketplace Seminar. My sense over the last couple years has been that there may be interest in technologies that are not yet commercialized but which a lot of people are either worried about as potential competition for their laser products or as potential opportunities. I'm going to talk about frequency conversion because that's going to have a dramatic effect on the way we categorize lasers. Traditionally solid state lasers were infrared. When you do frequency conversion they're no longer going to be infrared; they're going to be green, blue, red, ultraviolet, etc. I'm also going to talk very briefly about laser diode technologies; just to remind about some of the key considerations. Increasingly laser diodes are being used as pump sources, but in some ways we wouldn't have expected that a couple of years ago. Then I'm going to give you my view of what I think the power levels are likely to be for commercial lasers, particularly lasers that are diode pumped or diode related.

I was asked to speak on scientific laser trends and to do that I've organized niy talk today into two parts. The first part I was asked to talk a little bit about the markets, so we're going to talk a little bit about the niarkets for lasers in scientific applications. To discuss the iTarket, I've drawn on two sources for numbers, the R&D inarketplace survey that David Kales conducted that's published in the January 1991 issue of Laser Focus World and the study that we sponsored with Foresight Technology to study the federal funding for scientific R&D. I picked two areas of scientific R&D in the federal study to highlight, NASA because of the importance of lasers to NASA operations and then NSF because the National Science Foundation is the prinary source of niost funds for academic R&D in the States.

I was very pleased to see Laser Focus's analysis that we're now the leading consumer of lasers in the world. We put this analysis together in October/November and this year's analysis was generated primarily by the industry itself at our "Marketplace for Industrial Lasers" 1Teeting that was held in Chicago in September. So you're looking at the industry's numbers as recorded by them in conjunction with a consensus opinion of the people who participate in this portion of this industry. Slightly modified and rearranged. For those of you who are interested in the industrial market, SPIE will be publishing the proceedings of that meeting this month, or February I guess and I'd like to tell you that the industry did a remarkable job at reporting accurately and in great detail the size of the industrial laser market. So if that's on your agenda, you should certainly get in touch with the SPIE people to get a hold of it.

Solid state lasers are the real highlight of my talk today, and were really the star of the year. In every application area I can think of, people have tried with some success to introduce corturiercial solid state products. I'll go into more detail, but aside from solid state, a very significant event happened in Deceniber when one of the laser angioplasty companies (Advanced Interventional Systens) received FDA clearance to begin marketing the excimer for coronary applications (Figure 1) . This is the first time to my knowledge that an excimer has ever been cleared for a medical application in the United States. It's an event that we didn't really expect to happen so soon. It's extremely significant and we'll see where it goes from here. The system needs to be road-tested a bit but to get past the FDA is the major obstacle. Looking back to solid state laser the importance of solid state lasers is as researchers become more involved with the excimer and conduct more clinical studies in ophthalmology, they realize that it's not going to be a panacea for all refractive surgery or other ophthalmolic applications. In many cases it looks like the solid state laser may be the laser of choice in certain types of surgery; most notably perhaps in refractive surgery. We've all read about the success of the excimer at least in capturing the press's attention for corneal sculpting and vision correction. Well, it could be that actually the next generation will be a solid state laser, so let's keep an open mind here.

When you look at the federal government market there are a variety of players. On the buying side there are agencies and prine contractors and, as the Desert Shield/Desert Storm has driven hoite, there are foreign and international organizations that also buy U.S. technology through the United States government for foreign applications. I'm not dealing with the latter two in the talk today. I'm only dealing with goverrnrtent agencies. In the Laser Focus World federal photonics study, we surveyed people and asked them who the prine contractors were. A lot of the laser sales are actually sub-contract sales; if you're making components you may be a second tier sub-contractor. This is true for DoD, NASA, and the Department of Energy; not just defense.