We present a systematic study of basic characteristics of edge-emitting lasers based on a new type of quantum-sized InGaAs active medium grown on GaAs substrates. The active region referred to as quantum-well-dots (QWDs) comprises properties of quantum wells (QWs) and quantum dots (QDs). We have fabricated and investigated lasers with the active regions consisted of 1, 2, 5 and 10 layers of the QWDs. The low internal loss has allowed us to obtain maximal optical power as high as 8.8 W in the

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... tinuous wave (CW) regime. We have shown that QWD-based active media are very promising for devices requiring high gain, stacking a large number of layers in the active region, and suppressing of lateral carrier transport.