Facet etching process yields surface emitters
The new horizontal-cavity surface-emitting laser (HCSEL) integrates a horizontal laser cavity with a 45 degree etched reflecting mirror to direct the output beam vertically. BinOptics says that its device combines the power and high reliability of an edge-emitting laser with the low cost and ease of packaging of a VCSEL.
The first HCSEL product is a 1310 nm Fabry-Perot (FP) laser designed for uncooled operation at a data rate of 2.5 Gbit/s with an optical output power of 20 mW and a slope efficiency of up to 0.3 W/A. This product is available with or without an integrated monitoring photodetector (MPD).
The advantages of VCSELs operating at 850 nm were so compelling that VCSELs rapidly became the transmission source of choice in datacom applications. These benefits include on-wafer testing, the ability to fabricate one and two dimensional arrays on the same chip for easy coupling with fiber arrays or electronics, and side-by-side integration with detectors enabling low cost integrated transceivers.
These advantages have not been realized for VCSELs at 1310 nm because of materials issues such as the difficulty of matching 1310 nm active regions with high-reflectivity mirrors. These issues lead to low power and poor yield, negating most of the cost benefits.
BinOptics says that its 1310 nm HCSEL enables the advantages of VCSELs to be realized at longer wavelengths, and also allows monolithic integration of the MPD to further reduce cost.
Founded in November 2000, BinOptics is privately held and funded by two venture funds and Stanford University. The company is located in the Cornell Business & Technology Park in Ithaca, New York.
The company manufactures monolithically integrated laser chips based on its proprietary etched facet technology (EFT), which was invented by scientists at Cornell University. As its name implies, EFT uses etching, rather than cleaving, to manufacture the laser facets. The cleaving operation is often one of the most costly and lowest-yield steps in manufacturing conventional edge-emitting lasers. Also, cleaving can only be performed along certain crystallographic planes on the wafer, while etching can be carried out independently of these planes.
