Since the invention of lasers dated back to 1960’s, the unique emission characteristics not only contribute to the tremendous achievements in scientific research and industrial fields, but the physics behind the operation principle have triggered muchprogress in which the original inventionwould never be able to imagine. Among different variation of lasers, semiconductor lasers have evolved to be mostly used around us due to their low operation current, high efficiency, small footprint, fast direct modulation speed and rich selectivity of laser materials. Therefore, much progress has been made in semiconductor lasers in terms of different cavity structures and light-matter interaction, which intriguingly breaks the boundary of laser operation principles! In this talk, I’ll describe our recent works on GaN-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers and their relatives: microcavity polariton lasers and polariton light emitting diodes. In addition, I’ll introduce the laser cavities made by periodic photonic crystal patterns, quasi-periodic patterns and even random cavities, which were made artificially by state-of-the-art nanotechnology and/or self-assemble process. The talk will be ended up with the novel surface plasmon polariton nanolasers, showing that the extremely compact mode volume smaller than hundredth and even thousandth of diffraction limit can well exist in a tiny semiconductor device.