Minimization of damping in the electrooptic frequency response of high-speed Zn-diffusion single-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

We utilize the Zn-diffusion technique to fabricate a single-mode high-speed 850-mn vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. With this technique, we are able to minimize the thermal effect without greatly scaling down the diameter of the oxide-confined aperture. The demonstrated device has a 9-mu m active diameter with which we can attain a bandwidth of 8 GHz, a small differential resistance (similar to 47 Omega), and a maximum output power of 3 mW. The single-mode characteristics can be sustained under dynamic operation for the whole bias current range. The dynamic measurement results indicate that with this single-mode device the damping-limited bandwidth of our multimode control can be eliminated without a Zn-diffusion aperture. A larger intrinsic bandwidth (32 versus 21 GHz) is also obtained due to the minimization of damping. The narrower divergence angle (8 degrees versus 20 degrees) means that the device exhibits a larger alignment tolerance and much lower coupling loss (9 dB) when used with the standard multimode fiber than those of the control sample.