The main problems of providing a high-speed operation semiconductor lasers with a vertical microcavity (so-called “vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers”) under amplitude modulation and ways to solve them have been considered. The influence of the internal properties of the radiating active region and the electrical parasitic elements of the equivalent circuit of lasers are discussed. An overview of approaches that lead to an increase of the cutoff parasitic frequency, an increase of the differential gain of the active region, the possibility of the management of mode emission composition and the lifetime of photons in the optical microcavities, and reduction of the influence of thermal effects have been presented. The achieved level of modulation bandwidth of ∼30 GHz is close to the maximum achievable for the classical scheme of the direct-current modulation, which makes it necessary to use a multilevel modulation format to further increase the information capacity of optical channels constructed on the basis of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers.
The emission-line width for 850-nm single-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers based on InGaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells is studied. The width of the emission line for a laser with a 2-μm oxide current aperture attains it minimum (~110 MHz) at an output power of 0.8 mW. As the optical output power is further increased, anomalous broadening of the emission line is observed; this is apparently caused by an increase in the α-factor as a result of a decrease in the differential gain in the active region under conditions of increased concentration of charge carriers and of high internal optical losses in the microcavity. The α-factor is estimated using two independent methods.
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