High Bandwidth Simplicity VCSELs (Invited)

We review vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy on gallium-arsenide substrates with simplified epitaxial material designs. At an ambient of roughly 300 Kelvin we achieve smallsignal modulation bandwidths exceeding 20 gigahertz for our conventional single-optical-cavity 980 nanometer VCSELs with oxide aperture diameters of an estimated 17 micrometers with maximum multiple-mode static optical output powers at roll-over of 28 milliwatts. Sister VCSELs with oxide aperture diameters of about 2 micrometers at about 300 Kelvin achieve record smallsignal modulation bandwidths of 34 gigahertz and maximum single-mode static optical output powers of 4 milliwatts.