ABSTRACT
An optical communication system, which utilizes the light signal to carry information, requires optical transmitters to generate optical signals, fiber optics transmission media, and optical receivers to detect optical signals. Semiconductor lasers have been developed extensively to fulfill requirements of performance, reliability, and cost for the application to optical communication systems, and they are prerequisites as light sources in compact optical transmitter modules. This entry outlines the laser transmitters by first describing the basic technologies of semiconductor lasers, including conventional Fabry–Perot cavity edge-emitting lasers based on double heterostructure (DH) and quantum well (QW) structures, single-wavelength lasers incorporating distributed feedback (DFB) laser structures, and also advances in vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs).
