Technical Insight
Wafer-fused VCSELs shape up for enterprise applications
Swiss start-up BeamExpress has developed a high-volume manufacturing process for long-wavelength singlemode VCSELs, company founder and chief scientist Eli Kapon outlines the wafer-fusion technique.
Vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) offer numerous advantages over their edge-emitting counterparts for various different optoelectronics applications owing to their optical cavity configuration. In particular, VCSELs exhibit lower electrical power consumption, pure single-wavelength operation, easier coupling into singlemode optical fibers, compatibility with other optical elements for simpler packaging, and lower manufacturing costs thanks to the possibility of on-wafer testing.
In fact, short-wavelength (
