1.3 μm QD surface emitting laser using polymer optical circuit

Abstract

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) emitting at 1.3-μm are potentially attractive for optical interconnects. The advantages of such lasers include their lower driving current, a surface-mountable device structure, and a narrow circular output beam that is ideal for a polymer multimode waveguide on a printed circuit board [1]. Accordingly, there has been a widespread interest in developing 1.3-μm VCSELs [2,3] and a novel type of VCSEL, which is a lens-integrated surface-emitting laser that consists of a short InGaAlAs multiple-quantum-well (MQW) distributed feedback laser (DFB) active stripe integrated with a 45° mirror and an aspheric lens [4,5]. Here, we propose a novel 1.3-μm quantum dot (QD) surface emitting laser (SEL), which consists of a QD laser section and a polymer optical circuit (POC) section. A QD laser emitting at 1.3 μm needs to have a lower operation power and temperature insensitive operation because of the discrete energy state. A suitable POC design can be used to control the emitting place, direction, and beam profile of a laser. Moreover, POCs are easy to fabricate and are less expensive owing to the low cost of polymer material. In this work, we propose a QD SEL using a POC, which consists of a polymer optical waveguide, spot-size converter, and 45° metal mirror. We designed the polymer spot-size converter to match the laser beam profile using the optical polymer waveguide. We were able to realize the operation of a QD SEL using a POC.