Bandwidth9 to make 1.6-mm VCSELs

Connie Chang-Hasnain, president and CTO of Bandwidth9 (Fremont, CA) and currently on industrial leave from the University of California-Berkeley, described the successful manufacture of a high-performance, long-wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) during a postdeadline paper last week at the annual Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) in San Francisco. The paper, "High-performance 1.6-µm single-epitaxy top-emitting VCSEL," focused on the manufacture of what Chang-Hasnain described as the first single-epitaxy, monolithic, top-emitting VCSEL. The device operates in the CW mode at temperatures up to 55°C without requiring any heat-sinking and emits in a single transverse mode with fixed polarization. "Bandwidth9 has demonstrated an output power of 0.45 mW over 50-km fiber transmission at 2.5 Gbit/s without optical amplification," she said.