Journal Article

MBE-grown 1550 nm wafer-fused VCSELs for large data rate and energy efficient communication

Tian, Si-Cong, Blokhin, Sergey, Gladyshev, Andrey, Bimberg, Dieter, Egorov, Anton, Novikov, Innokenty, Babichev, Andrey, Kovach, Iakov, Maricar, Mansoor A, Derebezov, Ilya, Karachinsky, Leonid, Sapunov, Georgiy

2025

Overview

We report on the progress made in the development of 1550 nm vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) for data transmission applications. These lasers were grown using molecular beam epitaxy and manufactured through wafer fusion. Such devices exhibit high speed and high optical output power, benefitting from GaAs-based mirrors and an InP-based active region. We investigate their static and dynamic performance in order to optimize for long-distance fiber-optic communication. We achieved record data rates of 40 Gbps across 1 m single-mode optical fiber with a single-mode power exceeding 3.8 mW by using signal pre-emphasis. Long-distance tests show, that these VCSELs are capable of transmitting more than 27 Gbps across a 2 km single-mode fiber, and can achieve as low as 600 fJ energy consumption per bit transferred.

• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Subject: 1550 nm VCSELs / Data transmission / Energy consumption / energy-to-data rate EDR / Epitaxial growth / Fiber optics / high-speed data communication / intra-cavity contacts / MBE wafer fusion / Molecular beam epitaxy / Optical fibers / Power management / QW-based active region / single-mode / Vertical cavity surface emission lasers