Recent years have seen rapid development of chip-scale atomic devices due to their great potential in the field of biomedical imaging, namely chip-scale atomic magnetometers that enable high resolution magnetocardiography (MCG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). For atomic devices of this kind, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have become the most crucial components as integrated pumping sources, which are attracting growing interest. In this paper, the application of VCSELs in chip-scale atomic devices are reviewed, where VCSELs are integrated in various atomic bio-sensing devices with different operating environments. Secondly, the mode and polarization control of VCSELs in the specific applications are reviewed with their pros and cons discussed. In addition, various packaging of VCSEL based on different atomic devices in pursuit of miniaturization and precision measurement are reviewed and discussed. Finally, the VCSEL-based chip-scale atomic magnetometers utilized for cardiac and brain magnetometry are reviewed in detail. Nowadays, biosensors with chip integration, low power consumption, and high sensitivity are undergoing rapid industrialization, due to the growing market of medical instrumentation and portable health monitoring. It is promising that VCSEL-integrated chip-scale atomic biosensors as featured applications of this kind may experience extensive development in the near future.

Emerging optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) rely heavily on uniform-field coils that enables precise generation of magnetic field for either compensation or modulation. While conventional uniform-field coils suffer from stray fields between adjacent devices which has become the major drawback for applications where magnetometer array are needed including magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetocardiography (MCG). In this paper, a novel uniform-field coil that enables stray fields reduction and uniform magnetic field generation is proposed. Multipolar expansion of the magnetic vector potential is applied to Target Field Method (TFM), where the relative magnitude of the stray fields is estimated through Fourier coefficients of the stream function. Results demonstrate that the maximum absolute value of the field relative inhomogeneity error of Bx is 9.4%, and the maximum absolute value of the external relative magnetic field at 16.3 mm from the origin is approximately 1%. The device is fabricated through CMOS-compatible micro-fabrication method, and is characterized in muti-layer magnetic shield with residual magnetic field less than 10nT, which exhibits an open-loop sensitivity of 16 fT/Hz^1/2 in magnetometer experiments. This work paves the way for the integration of atomic magnetometers on chip.