VCSEL

Introduction
Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) are a type of semiconductor laser diodes. Unlike edge emitting laser diodes, VCSELs emit upwards and thus can be easily packaged as emitter arrays containing hundreds of emitters on a single chip. Other characteristics of VCSELs:

Wavelength range: 650nm-1080nm, 1550nm.
Power range: mW to Watts
High modulation bandwidth

VCSELs were first used in the telecom industry, and today are widely used as light sources in sensing applications. Low power (mW) applications include face and gesture recognition, proximity sensors, augmented reality displays. High power (Watts) applications include LIDARs for robotics, UAVs and autonomous vehicles. These new applications run on batteries and will need to minimize power consumption. Therefore characterization of VCSEL power, beam profile, noise, etc. is critical.
Often VCSELs are coupled with passive optics or scanning optics which generate very wide beams. Additionally, VCSELs are often used in pulsed mode. These factors make VCSEL test and measurement a challenging task. Ophir offers the right tools for this task.

See also our High Speed, Multifunctional Integrating Spheres which enable simultaneous measurement of multiple laser parameters including: power, pulse characteristics & spectrum.

Power, energy and irradiance measurement solutions