Patent ID: 6885686

Claim:
A surface emitting semiconductor laser comprising: (a) a semiconductor substrate; (b) an array of laterally-spaced laser device elements formed on the substrate, each of the laser device elements extending in a longitudinal direction on the substrate, each laser device element including a second order distributed feedback grating having optical gain, with a selected central phase shift in the grating within 30° of 180°, and each laser device element having distributed Bragg reflector gratings bounding the distributed feedback grating in the longitudinal direction to reflect light back to the distributed feedback grating, (c) electrodes by which voltage can be applied across the array and the substrate, and means for directing current to a region of the array containing the distributed feedback gratings of the laser device elements; and (d) laser device interelement regions on the substrate between the device elements, the device elements in which the distributed feedback grating and the distributed Bragg reflector gratings are formed having a lower effective refractive index than the index of the interelement regions, the interelement regions spacing the device elements by a width such that light propagating laterally from the device elements is fully transmitted between adjacent device elements to form a laterally resonant antiguided array for which the device elements are substantially equally coupled to each other.