High power laser sources are used in a large variety of applications for materials processing. The most common are welding, soldering, cutting, drilling, laser annealing, micro-machining, ablation and micro-lithography. Beside the right choice of the suitable laser source adequate high performance optics for the generation of the appropriate beam profile are essential. Widely used geometries are square and rectangular light fields or light lines with homogeneous intensity distributions. The whole devolution from optical design and engineering to products and applications is demonstrated. LIMO has developed powerful software tools founded on Maxwell’s Equations taking into account all important physical aspects of the beam shaping task. Various beam shaping principles, e.g. phase shifting for single-mode lasers, beam mixing for multimode lasers and other beam transformation schemes are discussed. Based on LIMO’s unique production technology with computeraided design free-form micro-lens surfaces can be structured costeffectively in a massively parallel process on wafer basis. Thus, the theoretically optimized surfaces can be transformed with high precision into a large range of materials. Typical products, their beam profiles and the respective materials processing results are shown for various applications. The mask-based micro-machining of ITO (indium tin oxide) is widely used in flat panel display production. Laser direct writing with top hat profiles is compared to Gaussian beams for the patterning of trenches in different materials. A high-power diode laser and a green line generator are demonstrated for thermal bonding and a-Si crystallization in flat panel display production.