1 W reliable operation of broad area lasers and 8 W reliable operation of 5 mm wide laser bars at 650 nm

Abstract

Reliability tests for 650 nm broad area lasers and bars with GaInP quantum wells embedded in AlGaInP waveguide layers and n-AlInP and p-AlGaAs cladding layers will be presented. Reliable operation of broad area lasers with 100 µm stripe width at 1.0 W output power over 10,000 h and of 5 mm wide bars with ten 100 µm wide emitters (filling factor 20%) at 8 W over 4,000 h will be reported. 6 mm wide bars with twelve 60 µm wide emitters (filling factor 12%) at 7 W showed a mean time to failure of 3,750 h.

20 000 h reliable operation of 100 µm stripe width 650 nm broad area lasers at more than 1.1 W output power

“…= 1 W and T = 15 • C, i.e. ρ rel = 10 mW μm −1 over 10 000 h was reported in [9]. Moreover, in this reference, 14 000 h failure free operation for a 5 mm bar with ten 100 μm stripe width emitters was demonstrated.…”

“…The output powers of the reliability test reported in this paper were achieved at I = 1.5 A for P = 1.1 W and I = 1.6 A for P = 1.2 W. Unfortunately, before starting the aging test already documented in [9] no absolute calibration with the GENTEC detector was performed. This leads to an incorrect power measurement and therefore instead of the intended power of 1.0 W the test was performed at 1.1 W.…”

“…Additionally AlGaAs allows the use of a standard process for the manufacturing of the devices. In our group the growth of the layer structure was optimized [14] and applied for different layer structures and BA devices [6,7,9,15].…”

“…This correction concerning the output power has to be done also for the 60 μm stripe width BA lasers from [9]. All single emitter tests were performed at a 10% higher output compared to the given value.…”

“…In this paper, a 20 000 h reliability study at T = 15 • C for 100 μm stripe width 650 nm BA lasers based on the SQW structure reported in [7] will be presented. This includes the above-mentioned test time from [9]. A recalibration of the power measurements showed that the devices were tested actually at an output power of P = 1.1 W instead the reported 1.0 W. After this time the test was continued at P = 1.2 W over another 10 000 h. No failure occurred over the whole test at facet loads up to 12 mW μm −1 demonstrating the quality of laser material, process, and mounting.…”