Microlasers for photonic switching and interconnection

Abstract

Vertical-cavity, surface-emitting lasers have great potential owing to their inherent two-dimensional geometry and very small gain nedium volumes which are essential to low threshold currents. Possible applications are optical switching/computing, photonic interconnection, high/low power laser sources, image processing, optical neural networks, etc. Driven by these high promises, there have been numerous reports on vertical cavity surface emitting laser diodes using InGaAs/GaAs/A1As, GaAs/AlGaAs structures. In this paper, we report characteristics of discrete InGaAs microlasers and monolithic two-dimensional arrays of microlasers. The advantages of optics for communications of data over distances longer than nearby gates have been argued previously. We proposed and demonstrated a photonic interconnect scheme using microlasers with planar optics which will be robust, accurate, and easily alignable.