Surface emitting lasers for avionics applications

Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers offer many unique features that are desirable and suitable for applications in optical interconnect, optical data bus, optical backplane, and optical signal processing. We describe basic device structure and fabrication techniques of GaAs based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, and discuss key laser performance characteristics such as emission wavelength, beam pattern, threshold current, power output, quantum efficiency, and modulation response that are important to these potential applications. We also describe the recent result on monolithic integration of the laser with an n-channel MESFET driver.<
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