Laser VCSEL Array

Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser arrays (VCSEL) are a new generation of laser diodes. Applications include illumination, structured light and pumping of solid state lasers. VCSELs are particularly well suited for high volume automotive lidar applications.

A VCSEL is a vertical cavity surface-emitting laser, a kind of laser diode which emits in a direction perpendicular to the wafer surface in contrast to the more common edge-emitting semiconductor lasers. Such a laser can produce only quite moderate powers in the milliwatt region. However, it is possible to fabricate two-dimensional arrays containing many such VCSELs on a common semiconductor chip and to utilize the combined emission of those. One can then obtain several watts, dozens or even hundreds of watts, depending on the number of used emitters. Therefore, a 2-D VCSEL array containing many thousand emitters can compete with diode bars and (combining multiple arrays) even with diode stacks based on edge-emitting semiconductor lasers.