Optically Injection-Locked VCSEL as a Duplex Transmitter/Receiver

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel communication system scheme with an optical injection-locked vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (OIL-VCSEL) acting both as a transmitter and as a receiver, under an identical forward-bias condition. We show that an OIL-VCSEL can function as a receiver with a small signal modulation bandwidth of ~20 GHz, and for large signal digital modulation with data rate as high as 12 Gb/s.