Author: Ting Fang, LimSupervisor: Dr Aleksandar Rakic

1
Design of Ultra High Speed Optical Transmission
Systems
Author Ting Fang, Lim Supervisor Dr
Aleksandar Rakic

• Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers
• What is a VCSEL?
  Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL)
  is a semiconductor micro-laser diode that emits
  light in a cylindrical beam vertically from the
  surface of a fabricated wafer.

• OC-192 VSR Interface
• Figure 2 Functional Block Diagram of OC-192 VSR
• VSR leverages low-cost technologies
  originally developed for Gigabit Ethernet and
  utilizes an array of 12 low-cost 850-nanometer
  lasers, each operating at 1.25 Gbps. These
  signals are carried over 12 fiber ribbons.
  Distances of up to 300 meters are supported over
  62.5 micron multimode fiber. A complete VSR
  transceiver is expected to have a substantially
  lower cost than current comparable OC-192 SONET
  serial optics. This will significantly reduce the
  cost of interconnecting high-speed optical
  elements within a central office. In addition,
  because a VSR transceiver is a fraction of the
  size of an equivalent OC-192 short-reach (SR)
  transceiver, it enables smaller, denser optical
  equipment.
  

• The Need for VCSELs

As more scalable computer systems, switching
systems or systems with high data throughput are
being used nowadays, there is an increase in
demand for high aggregate data rate in data
communications. So, fiber-optic technology is the
ideal technology of choice for the realization of
communication links with very large bandwidth
capacities that dramatically exceed what is
available with the traditional copper links. And
VCSELs are the ideal laser source for fiber optic
applications.