The continuous pursuit for emitters with higher power, good beam quality and wavelength tunability has led to the development of devices at the frontier between solid-state and semiconductor laser technologies. Optically-pumped semiconductor disk lasers, also called vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VECSELs), offer many advantages over standard semiconductor lasers such as high brightness, ultra-short pulse generation, single-frequency operation, etc. However, the significant long growth time and complexity of the Bragg reflector (DBR), as well as its high thermal resistance, hinder their full exploitation. In this presentation, we show the recent achievements and development of new semiconductor disk laser platforms in the 1-1.2 µm range using GaInAs MQWs gain structures towards the realization of continuous-wave high-power regimes. 

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