ROCKY MOUNTAIN SECTION OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
                              &
           IEEE LASERS AND ELECTROOPTICS SOCIETY


                        Nov. Meeting

Date:  Thursday, 21 Nov. 2002
Time:  7 PM refreshments, 7:30 PM talk
Place: National Center for Atmospheric Research
       Mesa Lab
       1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO
       Damon Room


Title: Directly Modulated 1.3 um Vertical Cavity Surface 
Emitting Lasers (VCSEL's) - From Wishful Thinking to 
Commercial Viability

       L. M. F. Chirovsky
       Optical Communication Products, Inc.
       325 Interlocken Parkway
       Broomfield, CO 80021


Abstract:

Movement towards ever-larger communication bandwidths demands 
major advances in optical networking equipment.  That means 
routers and switches with ever-increasing channel densities, 
which maintain high data rates per channel.  Furthermore, the 
solutions must be power efficient and cost effective.  The 
use of semiconductor laser and detector arrays is a very 
attractive way of facilitating such compact high-speed 
routers and switches.  VCSEL's are the natural choice for the 
laser arrays, and VCSEL arrays will meet the above needs, if 
they can also comply with the telecommunications networking 
standard for emission wavelengths near 1.3 um.  For a long 
time, fundamental epitaxial material issues have limited 
commercialized VCSEL's to much shorter wavelengths, near 850 
nm or 980 nm.  This talk will summarize the recent advances 
made in a monolithic GaAs technology that enables the cost-
effective manufacture of directly modulated 1.3 um VCSEL's.  
The talk will begin with a general overview of VCSEL 
principles.  It will then proceed with a discussion of the 
issues specific to 1.3 um VCSEL's, including a description of 
the various sets of specifications that the devices must 
meet.  Much of the talk's focus will be on the performance 
data of single devices and of typical 8 and 12 element arrays 
that demonstrates compliance to OC-48 IR and other 
specifications, with excellent power efficiency.  The talk 
will end with a presentation of very encouraging reliability 
data.  1.3 um VCSEL's are now poised to begin occupying a 
large telecommunications application space.

Biography:

Leo M. F. Chirovsky received his PhD in Physics from Columbia 
University, NY, NY in 1979.  He then stayed on at Columbia 
for another year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow.  In 1980, Leo 
joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he worked on Magnetic 
Bubble Memories, Parametric Amplifiers, Associative Memories, 
and Content-Addressable Memories.  In 1986, he began to work 
on the large-scale integration of vertically accessed optical 
devices, to enable the development of dense optical 
interconnects.  The basic building blocks were Multiple 
Quantum Well Diodes (MQWDs), which operated as detectors 
and/or modulators.  In 1990, he was named a Distinguished 
Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories.  Leo then led 
a project, which developed arrays of circuits, called Smart 
Pixels, comprising monolithically integrated MQWDs and Field 
Effect Transistors (FETs).  Thereafter, the project migrated 
to a hybrid approach, where large arrays of MQWDs were flip-
chip solder-bump bonded to Si CMOS chips to give pervasively 
used CMOS chips a high density optical interconnect 
capability.  By 1995, Leo realized that to make products with 
dense optical interconnects marketable, the MQWDs modulators 
should be replaced by VCSELs.  With a small team of 
collaborators, he began to develop 850 nm and 980 nm versions 
of a VCSEL design that were particularly amenable to 
integration.  The group demonstrated the efficacy of the 
design in 1998.  About one year later, 16x16 arrays of those 
VCSELs were successfully flip-chip bonded to CMOS chips and 
were operated by the on-chip CMOS drive circuits at data 
rates exceeding 1Gb/s/channel.  Soon thereafter, the group 
implemented further design improvements that enabled their 
amenable-to-integration VCSELs, emitting at ~850 nm, to 
operate at 10Gb/s.  In the year 2000, Leo retired from Bell 
Labs and joined Cielo Communications, Inc. to develop novel, 
monolithically fabricated 1.3 um VCSEL arrays.  In a little 
more than a year after his arrival, production-ready arrays, 
viable for TELECOM applications, were a reality.  Recently, 
Optical Communication Products, Inc. (OCP) of California 
acquired Cielo.  Leo is now a manager in the Device 
Development unit of OCP-Colorado.

He is a member of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, 
of the Optical Society of America, of the American Physical 
Society, of SPIE, and of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of 
America.