Optical Fiber Telecommunications VIA: Chapter 14. VCSEL-Based Data Links (Optics and Photonics)

Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL)-based data links are attractive due to their low-power dissipation and low-cost manufacturability. This chapter reviews the foundations for this technology, as well as the device and module design challenges of extending the data rate beyond the current level. We begin with a review of data communications from the business perspective, and continue with a brief discussion of the current and future standards. This is followed by a survey of recent advances in VCSELs, including data links operating at 28Gb/s. We review the recent efforts on ultra-fast data links and discuss the advantages of the different approaches. We also examine key design aspects of optical transceiver modules and we focus our discussion on novel applications in high-performance computing using both multi-mode and single-mode fiber optics. We highlight the importance of the device/component-level and system-level modeling and show some modeling examples with comparison to measured data. We conclude with a comparison of the VCSEL-based data links with other competing technologies, including silicon photonics and short-cavity edge emitting lasers.