Analysis of On Chip Optical Source Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL)

The major developments in semiconductor laser technology, i.e., Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs), really revolutionized the field of semiconductor lasers and play a pivotal role in every walk of life such as science and technology, research and development, consumer and industrial environment, medical, military, surveillance, telecommunication, and a host of other applications. Although the development of lasers is pertinent to each other because of dependence on Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) mirrors, the devices under reference are normally supposed to be the most appropriate semiconductor lasers for their evident plentiful significances and applications. In modern age, the importance of VCSELs is reflected in fact that they have become the second largest production among all types of semiconductor lasers due to intrinsic structure features of array formation, coherent emission with small beam divergence, large output power, low-threshold operations, high modulation bandwidths, etc., tuned by electrical and temperature variations. In the present investigation, the electrical and optical characteristics of the state-of-the-art long-wavelength VCSEL at 1310 nm emission is analyzed with different apertures such as 20 and 12 µm. The authors observed that if the oxide aperture of the same device is reduced 20 to 12 µm, it obtained the incremental in the carrier and photon density rates and subsequently reduces the emitted power, threshold current, and gain of the devices. The present communication discusses the history, present status, and an exposure of some state-of-the-art performances with optimized results of VCSELs.