Abstract
Introduction
Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have long been predicted as economic laser alternatives for various applications such as optical communications, sensing and imaging [
In this work, we report the lasing characteristics of 1550 nm VCSELs with hybrid DBRs between AlxGayIn(1-x-y)As/InP and SiO2/Si. VCSELs of 1550 nm wavelength show 20 mA threshold current. Output power is around 7 µW under CW operation at room temperature. The lasing spectrum is 1554 nm under CW operation which the full width at half maximum is 3 nm.
1 Device structure and fabrication
Figure 1.Top microscope image of fabricated VCSEL
2 Results and discussion
2.1 Current-light (I-L) characteristics
Figure 2.
is given by:
is active material area. The threshold current density then follow as . is the elementary charge and is the current injection efficiency accounting for lateral leakage currents and carrier overflow over confining barriers. The spontaneous recombination lifetime depends on the carrier density. The term and have the meaning of a threshold carrier density and a transparency carrier density, respectively. The active volume with is active material thickness. is Boltzmann constant. The threshold gain is and is constant. From Eq. 1 , we can find that depends on ,, ect. In other words, when the numbers of quantum well in VCSEL devices is the same, the DBR reflectivity required is high to achieve low threshold current and high output power. As can be seen from
Figure 3.Reflection spectra and the cavity mode of the VCSEL structure
is given by [
where is differential quantum efficiency. is Planck constant, . is photon frequency. denotes the differential series resistance. The kink voltage is related to the separation of quasi-Fermi energies but can be approximated by .
with . (5)
From which the maximum conversion efficiency is obtained as
It becomes clear that obtaining maximum conversion efficiency is one of the most challenging topics increasing the factor of , namely increasing the production of threshold current and resistance[
where is proton lifetime, is proton lifetime including mirror loss. is mirror loss from emission through the top and bottom mirror. is internal loss. is effective cavity length. is top mirror reflectivity. is bottom mirror reflectivity. As shown Eqs. 2-8, the main reasons for output power are followed by: (1) The strongest increase occurs with the horizontal electron leakage. This leakage current from the MQW active region into devices. In order to confine current, we can improve that buried tunnel junction can be employed. (2) The heating from device leads to a reduction of the differential quantum efficiency. Heat sink TEC can be added to control device temperature. (3) During the epitaxial growth, the interface is not ideal in the experiment process. Four times lithography processes before sputtering SiO2/Si DBR are used. Any particle residue in the interface after the cleaning process or the reflectance coatings poor quality can lead to light absorption and loss. We should strictly control the processed or adjustment processes order.
The typical I-V characteristics of devices are shown in
Figure 4.
2.2 Lasing spectra
The emission wavelength of a VCSEL is controlled by the resonator rather than the spectral position of the gain peak. For perfect alignment with emission wavelength,we have peak gain .
Figure 5.The lasing spectra of fabricate VCSEL
3 Conclusions
In summary, the lasing operation of 1550 nm VCSELs has been demonstrated. The electrical properties of VCSEL were studied using I-V charactics and I-P charactics measurents. The threshold current was 20 mA and the maximum output power was around 7 µW under CW 60 mA. The wavelength of lasing spectra is 1 554 nm and the FWHM is 3 nm. We analyse the threshold current and output power from both theory and experiments. We believe that InP-based VCSELs can be strong candidates for low-cost and long-reach optical interconnects.
References
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