Buried heterostructure VCSEL with semiconductor mirrors

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have achieved remarkable performance in threshold, speed, and efficiency. However the VCSELs have so far achieved their performance without the benefit of a buried-heterostructure (BH) gain structure. A high quality BH gain structure can be expected to dramatically improve VCSEL performance by eliminating parasitic charging effects in the perimeter region of the VCSEL´s gain material. The BH is expected to produce lower threshold, higher efficiency, and higher modulation speed for small VCSEL devices. Because many other parameters due to current funneling and heat spreading improve in small size VCSELs, a BH VCSEL could be expected to produce a significantly improved laser performance. However the BH VCSEL requires a design that can also form a high quality cavity, since the VCSEL performance is strongly dependent on cavity loss. These types of designs have not yet been very thoroughly investigated. Here we present to our knowledge the first report of a BH quantum well VCSEL, with the epitaxial growth over InGaAs quantum wells.