'Wen / Lin Li snow'
Apple has a big move recently to inject 300 million US dollars to Finisar to buy equipment and strapped VCSEL production capacity, in addition to direct endorsement of 3 D sensing industry, but also indirectly announced that Finisar will be included in the supply chain of Apple, and VCSEL Lei chip supply in 2018 Fear of the problem, followed by floating on the table, can produce VCSEL suppliers instantly become a popular fried chicken, VCSEL will also establish a star industry throughout 2018.
No VCSEL can not identify
iPhone X Face Recognition Launches 3 D Sensing Applications, Non-Amicable Battalist Wants Follow-up, 3 D Sensing Has Been Ranked No. 1 in Eight Emerging Trends in 2018 by JP Morgan, JP Morgan, 3 D sensing module will increase 20 times to 1 billion units by 2020 from 2017. In addition, it can be extended to AR / VR, UAVs and self-driving vehicles in the future And other new areas, no doubt, 3 D sensing has become the industry trend in the next few years.
However VCSEL only 3 D sensing in the ring, why must Apple hit the gold tied capacity? What exactly VCSEL?
According to the structure of the 3 D sensing module, the 3 D sensing needs to include one transmitter module and one receiver module. In the transmitter module, in addition to the wafer level optical component (WLO), the most critical part Is VCSEL, in simple terms, VCSEL is 3 D sensing infrared light source, without this light source, it can not make facial recognition, it can not launch or receive.
Early traditional 3 D sensing system generally use LED as the infrared light source, but technically, the LED does not have a resonant cavity, will lead to more divergent beams, poor coupling, VCSEL not only without these problems, and even with the VCSEL Technology matures, not only in terms of accuracy, miniaturization, low power consumption, reliability are more advantages than LED, and therefore, in recent years, the common 3D camera system, almost all use VCSEL as the infrared light source.
VCSEL technology has existed for a long time, but was not commercialized until 1996. After commercialized, it was only used in optical communication products in a small amount and could not be heard loudly because of the high technical difficulty Large-scale production equipment has been a big problem, and secondly, there is not enough application of the sea, supporting VCSEL plant to enlarge capital investment.
Technically, there are many similarities between VCSELs and LEDs on some processes, which are also based on the Group III-V semiconductor processes that incorporate optical materials. Unlike pure silicon, the yield of semiconductors can often reach 99% Five families of epitaxial process yield rate is generally not high, less than Jiucheng is common, and even to maintain VCSEL chip characteristics and reliability, VCSEL also must include the epitaxial technology, oxidation technology, the protection of insulation technology and other key technologies Among them, the oxidation process is completely LED technology, the protection of insulation process is most of the domestic manufacturers are almost impossible to overcome.