Single-mode, 1 Gb/s operation of double-fused vertical-cavity lasers at 1.54 μm

We demonstrate and characterize single-mode fiber-optic transmission using vertical-cavity lasers operating at 1.54 μm. The experiments were performed with 10-μm diameter double-fused InGaAsP strain-compensated quantum-well vertical-cavity lasers that operate continuously at room temperature with a side-mode suppression-ratio of 35 dB under pseudorandom modulation at 1 Gb/s. The bit-error rate was 3/spl middot/10/sup -12/ after transmission through 6.4 km of standard single-mode fiber. The maximum bandwidth was 2.3 GHz at a bias of 5.0 mA. The spectral linewidth was less than 0.1 nm.