46th Honda Prize 2025 awarded to VCSEL pioneer
The Honda Foundation is awarding the 2025 Honda Prize to Kenichi Iga (honorary professor at Institute of Science Tokyo and 18th president of former Tokyo Institute of Technology), for his conception of the VCSEL (vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser) and pioneering contributions to its basic research, and practical application.
Compared with conventional semiconductor lasers which emit light horizontally relative to the substrate, VCSELs emit light vertically, making them more compact, and producing less interference among neighbouring modes, enabling high density integration.
They also have advantages of stable oscillation at a single wavelength, ease of mass production, the ability to continuously vary wavelength, and low power consumption.
Kenichi Iga proposed the surface-emitting laser in 1977. In 1988, Fumio Koyama (currently distinguished professor/professor emeritus at the Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo), a student of Iga, succeeded in achieving continuous-wave operations at room temperature, paving the way for practical implementation.
Since then, researchers worldwide have engaged in surface-emitting laser research, with related papers now exceeding 60,000 globally. Worldwide adoption and development efforts by numerous companies have led to commercialisation of the technology, bringing significant transformations to people’s lives, enabling ultra-high-speed, high-capacity parallel communication in data centers and LANs, energy savings, 3D facial recognition in smartphones, and expansion into LiDAR.
The Honda Prize award ceremony is scheduled to be held at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo on November 17, 2025. In addition to the prize medal and diploma, the laureate will be awarded a total of 10 million yen (around $6800).
