Developments of VCSELs for printers and optical communications at Fuji Xerox

Abstract

We review the characteristics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) for use in printers and optical communications. In 2003, we launched the world's first laser printer with a 780-nm single-mode 8×4 VCSEL array introduced to the light exposure system in order to meet the market demands for improving the image quality and speed for laser printers. The design of the VCSEL array enabled us to increase the pixel density and the printing speed by projecting 32 beams at a time to the photoconductor in the exposure process. High uniformity with less than 5% of variation has been achieved for both the optical output and the divergence angle. Currently, our high-end color printer is capable of producing the resolution of 2400 dpi (dots per inch) at the speed of 137 ppm (pages per minute). In the field of optical interconnections and networks, 850-nm VCSELs are needed as high-speed optical transmitters (≥10Gbps). In order to address communication traffic that will increase further as well as to reduce their power consumption to an even lower level, we assessed the lasing characteristics of 850-nm VCSELs with InGaAs strained quantum-well (QW) active layers by changing the ratio of Indium composition. As a result, we succeeded in reducing the power consumption per bit to 43 fJ/bit at 10-Gbps, which is much lower than that of commercial GaAs QW VCSELs. Also, we studied 850-nm transverse-coupled-cavity VCSELs, which enabled us to achieve a high 3dB modulation bandwidth (>23 GHz) and realize eye-openings at the large-signal modulation rate of 36 Gbps.