Index guiding dependent effects in implant and oxide confined vertical-cavity lasers

Implant and oxide confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers are compared in terms of properties dependent upon the nature of index guiding in the two structures including CW threshold current scaling with size, light-current linearity, pulsed operation delay, and beam profiles. The oxide confined lasers, fabricated by wet thermal oxidation, have a built-in index guide and thus exhibit substantially better properties than do lasers from the same wafer fabricated by proton implantation which rely on a thermal lens to reduce diffraction losses.