Diode-pumped ultrafast lasers - nearly ideal optical pulse generators in the picosecond and femtosecond regime - have progressed over the last decade from complicated and specialized laboratory systems to compact, reliable instruments. We improved the performance over several orders in magnitude in pulse repetition rates and in high average output power due to high-brightness semiconductor lasers for optical pumping and new types of fast optical saturable absorbers based on semiconductor devices (i.e. SESAM). It is possible today for example to achieve full C-band tuning with a diode-pumped Er:Yb:glass with up to 50-GHz pulse repetition rate, all-solid-state synch-pumped OPOs can reach the S-, C- and L-band and up to 80 GHz pulse repetition rates, and in addition the timing jitter of diode-pumped solid-state lasers is very close to the quantum noise limit. Much more pulse energy in the µJ-regime has been obtained with modelocked thin-disk Yb:YAG laser at around 50 MHz pulse repetition rate. This laser has been used to produce an RGB source with close to 10 W average output power in each color and a peak intensity up to 1014 W/cm2 at 50 MHz pulse repetition rate. In addition, diode-pumped passively modelocked VECSELs are demonstrating more than 2 W average output power with close to transform-limited pulses and with 1.4 W average power at 10 GHz - something semiconductor lasers never have been able to do before. Full wafer-scale integration will make these sources extremely compact and cheap. The goal of this talk is to review the current status and give an overview of our research activities in compact ultrafast lasers at ETH Zurich.