The electrically pumped vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) was first demonstrated with metal cavities by Iga (1979); however, the device threshold current was too high. Distributed Bragg reflector cavities proposed by… Click to show full abstract
The electrically pumped vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) was first demonstrated with metal cavities by Iga (1979); however, the device threshold current was too high. Distributed Bragg reflector cavities proposed by Scifres and Burnham (1975) were adopted to improve the optical cavity loss. Yet, it was not a practical use until the discovery of the native oxide of AlGaAs and the insertion of quantum wells to provide simultaneous current and optical confinement in semiconductor laser by Holonyak and Dallesasse (1990). Later, the first “low-threshold” oxide-confined VCSEL was realized by Deppe (1994) and opened the door of commercial application for a gigabit energy-efficient optical links. At present, we demonstrated that the oxide-confined VCSELs have advanced error-free data transmission [bit-error rate (BER)
               
Click one of the above tabs to view related content.