Proceedings Article | 13 March 2013
Chad Wang, Fedor Talantov, Henry Garrett, Glen Berdin, Terri Cardellino, David Millenheft, Jonathan Geske
KEYWORDS: Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, High power lasers, Continuous wave operation, Solid state lasers, Ceramics, Packaging, Semiconducting wafers, Manufacturing, Solid state physics
High-power, format flexible, 885 nm vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays have been developed for
solid-state pumping and illumination applications. In this approach, a common VCSEL size format was designed to
enable tiling into flexible formats and operating configurations. The fabrication of a common chip size on ceramic
submount enables low-cost volume manufacturing of high-power VCSEL arrays. This base VCSEL chip was designed
to be 5x3.33 mm2, and produced up to 50 Watts of peak continuous wave (CW) power. To scale to higher powers,
multiple chips can be tiled into a combination of series or parallel configurations tailored to the application driver
conditions. In actively cooled CW operation, the VCSEL array chips were packaged onto a single water channel cooler,
and we have demonstrated 0.5x1, 1x1, and 1x3 cm2 formats, producing 150, 250, and 500 Watts of peak power,
respectively, in under 130 A operating current. In QCW operation, the 1x3 cm2 VCSEL module, which contains 18
VCSEL array chips packaged on a single water cooler, produced over 1.3 kW of peak power. In passively cooled
packages, multiple chip configurations have been developed for illumination applications, producing over 300 Watts of
peak power in QCW operating conditions. These VCSEL chips use a substrate-removed structure to allow for efficient
thermal heatsinking to enable high-power operation. This scalable, format flexible VCSEL architecture can be applied
to wavelengths ranging from 800 to 1100 nm, and can be used to tailor emission spectral widths and build high-power
hyperspectral sources.
