Wide temperature operation of 850-nm VCSEL and isolator-free operation of 1300-nm VCSEL for a variety of applications

Furukawa Electric is looking at a variety of applications using VCSEL. New applications such as sensors, automobile, and home electric appliances require new characteristics of stable CW operation, higher modulation, wider temperature range, and higher density array. Automobile Local Area Network called MOST (Media Orientated System Transport) is now popular using 650 nm LED plus Plastic Optical Fiber with a 1 mm core. For higher operation temperature and higher transmission speed, the system with 850 nm VCSEL plus HCS (Hard Clad Silica) fiber with a core of 200 microns Silica has been investigating. We investigated 850 nm oxide VCSEL performances of LI, RIN, Eye, BERT and reliability in a wide temperature range from -40 to 125°C In order to obtain low-cost modules for data-communication, it is critical to eliminate high-cost components such as an isolator and a lens containing in the module. We confirmed 2.5 Gbps stable operation without the isolator for 1300 nm GaInNAsSb oxide VCSEL experimentally and theoretically. The RIN was stable around -145 dB/Hz with an optical feedback light less than -30 dB and drastically increased at this point. It was -110 dB/Hz with -13 dB. For an increasing demand of high bandwidth for the interconnection between computers and routers, it is important to investigate the maximum frequency of an existing 1300 nm GaInNAsSb VCSEL. We showed the intrinsic maximum modulation frequency of 23 GHz by fitting K-factor that was 0.385 nsec.