Abstract:Along with the maturity of high-nonlinearity optical fiber manufacturing technology and the improvement of the performance of fiber lasers, the supercontinuum sources have entered a period of rapid development. Supercontinuum generation by using optical fibers as the non-linear media has become a research hotspot. The technical schemes and recent progress of supercontinuum generation were been reviewed from three different bands:visible, near-infrared and mid-infrared. At present, the output power of the visible and near-infrared supercontinuum sources broke through 100 W. At the same time, many new schemes such as supercontinuum generation in multi-core photonic crystal fibers, fiber amplifiers and random fiber lasers were developed. The output power of mid-infrared supercontinuum generation by using fluoride and tellurite fibers as non-linear media, also reached 10 W. The output spectrum of supercontinuum generation with chalcogenide optical fibers as non-linear medium was extended to more than 12 μm.