Microlasers for photonic switching and interconnection

Abstract

Vertical-cavity, surface-emitting lasers have great potential owing to their inherent two-dimensional geometryand very small gain nedium volumes which are essential to low threshold currents. Possible applications areoptical 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 verticalcavity surface emitting laser diodes using InGaAs/GaAs/A1As, GaAs/AlGaAs structures16. In this paper, wereport 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 arguedpreviously7. We proposed and demonstrated a photonic interconnect scheme using microlasers with planaroptics which will be robust, accurate, and easily alignable.