Читать книгу VCSEL Industry - Babu Dayal Padullaparthi - Страница 49
1.5.2 Toward VCSEL Photonics
ОглавлениеEver since Honeywell started VCSEL commercialization and introduced the first reliable product in around 1996 [57], VCSEL technology has made a huge impact on several key industries with multiple growth windows. Thanks to several commercial epi‐houses, III‐V opto‐foundries, and other equipment vendors, researchers and engineers have overcome great challenges to make VCSEL‐based commercial products a practical reality since the beginning of 2021.
After 44 years of VCSEL invention [25] and the marathon industry efforts to realize volume manufacturing, it is not surprising that most people carry a VCSEL device along with them, if not a few! This means VCSELs have rapidly grown up, fully matured, and penetrated into commercial products that affect the daily lives of humans.
Four major industries dominate most of the VCSEL applications space (called core products), while few other neighboring fields are also emerging in the entire VCSEL application seabed. On core applications, the first is high‐speed VCSELs for data communications and data center applications. There is a steady demand for 100 to 300 m active optical cables in 100–400 Gb/s data center needs, HDMI AOC, USB‐3 (c‐type), and so on. The world’s fastest (as of 2019 and 2020) high‐performance computer, Fugaku, uses more than 6 400 000 chips of VCSELs for AOCs.
The second and biggest opportunity is high‐power VCSEL arrays for consumer electronics (3D sensing and imaging up to 10 m), including illumination, face recognition (FR), and augmented reality (AR) needs. This extends to object detection for autonomous vehicles and intelligent transport through powerful long‐range LiDARs up to 250 m or beyond. Further high‐power VCSEL arrays (where 100 000 to a few million units of emitters are needed) find applications in industrial heating.
Furthermore, we find VCSEL applications in neighboring areas such as coherent communication, laser printers, additive manufacturing, gas sensing and spectroscopy, biometrics such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and iris scans, gaming (VR and MR), robotics, and drones attracting considerable investments, particularly on AI programming, smart home and IoT, and automotive Ethernet and even to quantum computing.