Tunable Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers Integrated with Two Wafers

A novel two-wafer concept for micro-electro-mechanically tunable vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) is presented. The VCSEL is composed by two wafers: one micro-electromechanical-system membrane wafer with four arms to adjust the cavity length through electrostatic actuation and a "half-VCSEL" wafer consisting of a fixed bottom mirror and an amplifying active region. The measurement results of the electricity pumped tunable VCSEL with more than 9 mW output power at room temperature over the tuning range prove the feasibility of the proposition.