A new method for extending rate equation based VCSEL model with multimode spectral characteristic

Abstract

An accurate VCSEL model is important to evaluate the performance of VCSEL-based high speed short range optical interconnect system. Current VCSEL models show no evidence of the multimode spectral characteristic, which leads to an inaccurate performance estimation of VCSEL-based high speed optical interconnect system especially with large chromatic dispersion. To overcome this problem, we propose a new method to introduce multimode spectral characteristic into current VCSEL models, which extends the spatiotemporal multimode rate equations by calculating the wavelength shift of the VCSEL transverse modes. A VCSEL-multimode fiber (MMF) based short range optical interconnect simulation system is then built using our modified VCSEL model by VPItransmissionMaker. The symbol broadening and the BER performance of 15 Gb/s NRZ signal are tested in both left-tilted differential mode delay (DMD) profile MMF (L-MMF) and right-tilted DMD profile MMF (R-MMF). Simulation results validate our proposed method and indicate that the spectral characteristic is a key component for VCSEL models.