A bird's eye view on semiconductor lasers in China

The history of semiconductor lasers has two key milestones, Lincoln Laboratories, IBM and GE gave the initial simultaneous demonstration of lasing action of homojunction GaAs diode at 1962, continuous operation (CW) of a semiconductor laser at room temperature did not occur until 1970, which were contributed by the loffe Institute of USSR and Bell Laboratories. It is worth pointing out that since then several important events on this field have occured, such as GaAlAs DFB LD(1971), quantum well lasers(1978), 1. 3um LD(1977), InGaAsP DFB & DBR (1979), 1. 55um LD and optical bistability LD(1981). Soon after development of important semiconductor lasers in the advanced countries, Chinese scientists developed their own novel devices. The comparison of the development of semiconductor lasers device between the world and China is shown in figure 1. It seems that some important devices with bright future of application in China are not far behind the world level. We will show the new achievements in three different devices as following.