High-power vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays, which can serve as the light source in modern lidar and three-dimensional optical sensing systems, have recently attracted a lot of attention. In these types of systems, the time-of-flight (ToF) technique, based on the round-trip time of short optical pulses is usually adopted. Further enhancement of the ranging distance and depth resolution in these ToF driven systems by the incorporation of a VCSEL array with a high available power, high brightness (narrow divergence angle), and fast response time is highly desirable. However, a large number of light emission apertures (several hundreds) in the VCSEL array is usually necessary to raise the output power level to several watts. This leads to a large parasitic capacitance and the RC-limited bandwidth may become the dominant limiting factor of the speed of the high-power VCSEL array. In this work, Zn-diffusion and oxide-relief apertures are used to manipulate the optical modes and reduce the parasitic capacitance, respectively, in a unit device for a 940 nm VCSEL array. The demonstrated VCSEL array has a quasi-single-mode output, high available power (4 W; 1% duty cycle), narrow divergence angle (
∼
14
∘
at
1
/
e
2
) under maximum output power, and a fast rise time (
<2019
In this work, we demonstrate a novel high-power vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array with highly single-mode (SM) and single-polarized output performance without significantly increasing the intra-cavity loss and threshold current (
I
th). By combining a low-loss zinc-diffusion aperture with an electroplated copper substrate, we can obtain a highly SM output (side mode suppression ratio
>
50
d
B
) with a very narrow divergence angle (
1
/
e
2
:
∼
10
∘
) under high output power (3.1 W; 1% duty cycle) and sustain a single polarization state, with a polarization suppression ratio of around 9 dB, under the full range of bias currents. Compared to the reference device without the copper substrate, the demonstrated array can not only switch the output optical spectra from quasi-SM to highly SM but also maintain a close threshold current value (
I
th: 0.8 versus 0.7 mA per unit device) and slope efficiency. The enhancement in fundamental mode selectivity of our VCSEL structure can be attributed to the single-polarized lasing mode induced by tensile strain, which is caused by the electroplated copper substrate, as verified by the double-crystal x-ray measurement results.
In this work, a novel design for the electrodes in a near quasi-single-mode (QSM) vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array with Zn-diffusion apertures inside is demonstrated to produce an effective improvement in the high-speed data transmission performance. By separating the electrodes in a compact 2×2 coupled VCSEL array into two parts, one for pure dc current injection and the other for large ac signal modulation, a significant enhancement in the high-speed data transmission performance can be observed. Compared with the single electrode reference, which parallels 4 VCSEL units in the array, the demonstrated array with its separated electrode design exhibits greater dampening of electrical-optical (E-O) frequency response and a larger 3-dB E-O bandwidth (19 vs. 15 GHz) under the same amount of total bias current (20 mA). Moreover, this significant improvement in dynamic performance does not come at the cost of any degradation in the static performance in terms of the maximum near QSM optical output power (17 mW @ 20 mA) and the Gaussian-like optical far-field pattern which has a narrow divergence angle (full-width half maximum (FWHM): 10° at 20 mA). The advantages of the separated electrode design lead to a much better quality of 32 Gbit/sec eye-opening as compared to that of the reference device (jitter: 1.5 vs. 2.8 ps) and error-free 32 Gbit/sec transmissions over a 500 m multi-mode fiber has been achieved under a moderate total bias current of 20 mA.
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