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Compound semiconductor heterostructures of the III-V's consisting of nanometre-scale building blocks, often prepared by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) for atomic layer-by-layer accuracy in deposition, have become corner stones of many recent optoelectronic devices, which exhibit unprecedented performance characteristics. My talk will be concerned with such heterostructures and OE devices, in particular, (i) GaAs -based diode lasers that have potential to replace the now-dominant InP -technology at ~ 1.3 m for fibre optic telecommunication transmitters, (ii) low-cost and fast nanoimprint lithography (NIL) to prepare sub-micron surface reliefs for distributed-feed-back lasers, (iii) semiconductor disk lasers, or VECSELs, of high output power with a good beam quality factor typically M2 < 1.1, operating in the red, near-IR, and mid-IR spectral bands, and (iv) non-linear (quantum-mechanical) saturable absorber mirrors, or SESAMs, used as cavity end-mirrors in VECSELs and fibre lasers to produce mode-locked ultra-short optical pulses. Finally, I shall discuss industrial exploitation of OE heterostructures and devices, largely developed in Tampere, where the main Finnish compound semiconductor research and industry are concentrated. |