In this letter, we demonstrate the first result of a high-power (1 mW) cont
inuous-wave room-temperature vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser emittin
g at 1.55 mu m using a single InP substrate. The whole structure was grown
monolithically using gas source molecular beam epitaxy and incorporates two
original approaches. The first originality consists in the growth of a met
amorphic GaAs-AlAs Bragg mirror directly on an InP-based cavity, The second
novel idea is to use a tunnel junction for current injection. Moreover by
using these two approaches the processing is very simple and, therefore, fu
lfills the goal for low-cost laser production in access and interconnection
s applications.