As the industry has focused on the high-volume manufacturing of VCSELs for applications in 3D sensing, other application areas for VCSELs have gone underserved. Dallas Quantum Devices is a boutique VCSEL company specializing in custom solutions. Several design, epitaxial, and process technologies have been used to create novel VCSEL designs for applications in data communications and illumination.

We experimentally demonstrate for the first time electrically-injected Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) with post-supported high-contrast gratings (HCGs) at 940 nm. The HCG-VCSELs have two posts to support the air-suspended HCGs, being realized by simple fabrication without critical point drying. The HCGs can be released with a 100% yield in water or isopropanol. The HCG-VCSEL with a 4 μm × 8 μm oxide aperture achieves a low threshold current of 0.65 mA and a large side-mode suppression ratio of 43.6 dB under continuous-wave operation at 25 degrees. Theoretically, the relaxation resonance frequency of the HCG-VCSEL will increase by 16% compared with that of the conventional VCSEL with a λ/2 cavity. The data rate of 100 Gbps in the on-off keying modulation format for the HCG-VCSEL is expected.

We experimentally demonstrate that circular oxide apertures with small side deformations of large-area 980 nm VCSELs contribute to an increase in the optical output power by more than 60% and in the quantum efficiency by more than 10%. We elaborate on the physical background of this behavior and its applicability to small aperture VCSELs. We show that the efficiency of stimulated emission can be enhanced by engineering the spectral structure of the resonator. Such an approach is used already to enhance spontaneous emission,but has been left unexplored in the context of the stimulated emission of VCSELs.

A simplified fabrication process for VCSELs which employs oxidation-vias for definition of the laser aperture and bond pad is applied to a full 150mm wafer as a technique for material characterisation. This Quick Fabrication process produces representative VCSELs, with performance comparable to standard process VCSELs, with threshold currents for 8μm oxide-aperture devices measured between 0.8 and 1.3mA for both device types. The redshift of the lasing wavelength and threshold currents are used for rapid assessment of the VCSEL wafers.