Abstract
This paper is going to review the state-of-the-art of the high-speed 850/940-nm vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), discussing the structural design, mode control and the related data transmission performance. InGaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well (MQW) was used to increase the differential gain and photon density in VCSEL. The multiple oxide layers and oxide-confined aperture were well designed in VCSEL to decrease the parasitic capacitance and generate single mode (SM) VCSEL. The maximal modulation bandwidth of 30 GHz was achieved with well-designed VCSEL structure. At the end of the paper, other applications of the near-infrared VCSELs are discussed.
Highlights
To meet the demand on the rapid development of the internet at present, versatile laser diodes based optical fiber transmission has been widely applied in long-haul backbone and medium-range metropolitan area networks, and in short-distance area networks or intra/inter data center links
Owing to the urgent requirement on the higher data transmission rate for the faster up-/down-stream data exchange in intra data centers, the currently available transmission link based on multi-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) and multi-mode fiber at 10 Gbps/ channel has gradually found its bottleneck to supply the tremendous network flux instantaneously
Beyond the specification of the 40/100 Gbps data center that has been commercially available, the definition and design of next-generation 400-Gbps or even 1.6-Tbps transceiver module based on high-speed VCSELs at 850 nm has been initiated toward practical applications no later than 2020
Summary
To meet the demand on the rapid development of the internet at present, versatile laser diodes based optical fiber transmission has been widely applied in long-haul backbone (with single-mode fiber, SMF and distributed feedback laser diode, DFBLD) and medium-range metropolitan area networks (with SMF/DFBLD or single-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser, VCSEL), and in short-distance area networks or intra/inter data center links (with SMF/DFBLD or multi-mode fiber and multi-mode VCSEL). In 2013, Westbergh et al used the VCSEL with the 7-μm oxide-confined aperture to achieve the maximal modulation depth to 27 GHz, which performs the NRZ-OOK data transmission at 44 Gbps over 50-m OM4 fiber and at 47 Gbps under BtB condition[30]. In 2016, Shi et al further employed the Zn-diffusion technology and oxide-relief aperture to obtain the quasi-SM VCSEL with the modulation bandwidth of 27 GHz, which processed the 54 Gbps NRZ-OOK data transmission with the bit error rate (BER) of 1.4×10-4 over 1-km OM4 fiber[32]. In 2011, Ingham et al employed the oxide-confined VCSEL with the modulation bandwidth of 20 GHz to demonstrate the 32 Gbps PAM-4 data transmission with the BER below the forward error correction (FEC) criterion of 3.8×10-3 by using the pre-distortion technology[35]. When increasing the MMF distance from 200 to 300 m, the low-to-high frequency spectral power transformation is induced to suppress the peak-to-peak signal amplitude of the PAM-4 data, which further decreases the transmission capacity to 48 Gbps[40]
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