AMC7135 is a linear, low drop, constant current regulator intended for driving leds from batteries with only a small voltage above what they require. It can be used for lasers as well, also for driving pump diodes from 2 NiMH cells etc.However, the chip in this topic is something else entirely: It's a buck switchmode converter with current limitation.This can still work fine as is proven by a load of laser drivers operating under the same principle on the market, but you have to be a bit careful.One big difference between lasers and leds is how they handle short situations of overcurrent. Most leds fail from overcurrent due to thermal reasons, where laser diodes have problems with optical breakdown of their facets.This means a driver can briefly send out a jolt of current on, for example, switch on, into a LED and be fine, but it would fry a laser diode if that brief period was only a millisecond.The only way to be certain is to hook the driver up to a dummy load, and watch current on a scope during power-on, adjustment and power-off. If you see no overshoots it should be fine for laser use.You can probably see it on an analog scope, but it works best if you have a digital scope with storage that can operate in single-shot mode so you can easily examine the power-on and power-off behaviour.

• Analog Laser Driver Circuit

Analog Laser Driver Circuit

I think it will work just fine as a laser diode driver. All laser diode drivers (and led drivers) are essentially voltage regulators. They simply regulate to voltage over a shunt resistor and, because V=IR, regulate the current.Looking over the datasheet its seems fine, but I would add capacitors to the output to clean it up a little bit since laser diodes are a bit more sensitive than leds. You can see the funky output in on of the graphs on the datasheet. Only down side is it doesn't really handle much current.