It is shown that the well-known blue-shift of the fundamental absorption edge in as-deposited compositionally modulated amorphous Si/Ge and As 6 Se 94 /Se 80 Te 20 multilayers (with periods of 4-8 nm) is further enhanced due to the thermal or laser-induced intermixing of adjacent layers.The laser-induced intermixing process, as supported by experiments and model calculations, can be attributed to both the local heating and photo-effects in As 6 Se 94 /Se 80 Te 20 multilayers, while only the thermal effects were observed for Si/Ge multilayers. Structural transformations, based on this enhanced interdiffusion, provides good capability for spatially patterning optoelectronic devices and digital information recording. a) Corresponding author.