The diode-laser end-pumped microchip crystal laser is presented in this paper. A novel structure of the all solid-state laser is designed. The microchip Nd:VO

4

crystal is used as a laser medium

and its thickness is 1mm. The LD at wave-length of 809nm is used as a pump source. It is emphasized that a unique optical coupling system is designed. This system consits of both the coupling system and the focusing system for the LD laser beam. In order to achieve high conversion efficiency and increase the output power

the hemiconfocal resonator is chosen. The resonator is a combination of one of Nd:VO

4

crystal plane surfaces and spherical mirror of the radius of curvature

R

=21mm

and the resonator's length is 10.5mm. The mode matching between the pump beam and laser mode in the active material is discussed in detail for single transverse mode operation. The output power of 152mW of TEM

00

mode at 1064nm has been obtained for pumping power of 400mW. The correspondig laser threshold is 48.3mW. The total optical to optical conversion efficiency and slope efficiency are 38% and 43%

respectively.