Customer Reviews

Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers: Design, Fabrication, Characterization, and Applications (Cambridge Studies in Modern Optics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a compilation of chapters written by many authors. I usually hate that, as it typically means some re-prints of some research papers they have written. Somehow, they've managed to avoid this pitfall to provide, believe it or not, a technical book that I actually _enjoy_ reading (the only other one that comes to mind is "In Search of Clusters").

The book is composed of twelve chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to VCSELs. The following two chapters are probably the most math-heavy portions of the text, and go into some detail regarding the physics of VCSELs. Chapters 3 to 8 cover mostly practical design and fabrication issues of various types of VCSELs and the remaining chapters go into some detail about applications.

Be aware that this is an introductory book on VCSELs, _not_ semiconductor lasers. One really needs to have at least a basic understanding of lasers and semiconductor devices before jumping in. However, if you have even a basic (undergrad) understanding of this, the rest is nice reading. The first chapter is a short introduction to VCSELs and covers some major structures such as: etched mesa, proton implanted, dielectric apertured, and buried heterostructures. Also included are topics about long- and short-wavelength lasers, fabrication techniques and applications and VCSEL arrays

There are also discussions on various fabrication and performance issues with VCSEL's, such as polarization instabilities. I don't think it went into enough detail regarding standard performance metrics and methods of characterizing these metrics. I think this is an important issue for both production or research which could've filled an entire chapter.

The last few chapters are basically all about applications of VCSELs and practical problems. If you ever wanted to know how to make a reliable optical connection, the various standards and methods are described. This is more "general interest" stuff and can probably be skipped, but it's a good read anyways. It will definitely be worthwhile reading for engineers who are looking for ideas.

It's a textbook, so I noticed some things aren't up to date, but to be fair, no textbook can be fully up to date, especially one that initially went to print in 1999.

Overall, I think this is a good introductory book (a real one, not some graduate reference text posing as an introduction!), written by various experts in both academia and industry. It's relatively inexpensive, so if you're getting in the field, I'd recommend putting this on your bookshelf.