Advanced analysis of high-temperature failure mechanisms in telecom lasers

Abstract

Laser performance degradation at elevated temperature often requires the use of costly cooling devices. Much effort has been devoted to understand and overcome the high-temperature failure of laser diodes used in telecommunication applications (wavelength 1.3-1.6 gm). Various physical mechanisms have been proposed to explain high-temperature effects, including Auger recombination, carrier leakage, intervalence-band absorption, gain reduction and others. The discussion of the dominating effects is still controversial. One reason for this controversy is the use of simplified theoretical models that emphazise selected mechanisms. One-sided models lead to onesided interpretations of measurements. In this paper, high-temperature measurements on InP laser diodes are analyzed using a comprehensive laser model that includes all relevant physical mechanisms self-consistently. The software combines two-dimensional carrier transport, heat flux, strained quantum well gain computation, and optical wave guiding with a longitudinal mode solver. Careful adjustment of material parameters leads to an excellent agreement between simulation and measurements at all temperatures. At lower temperatures, Auger recombination controls the threshold current. At high temperatures, vertical electron leakage from the separate confinement layer is the main cause of performance degradation. The increase of internal absorption is less important. However, all these carrier and photon loss enhancements with higher temperature are mainly triggered by the reduction of the optical gain due to Fermi spreading of carriers.

Design and optimization of distributed feedback lasers with low relative intensity noise

“…PICS3D provides self-consistent modeling and simulation of semiconductor lasers, which can be used to fit experimental results and design new structures. Here, we model InGaAsP multi-quantum-well (MQW) lasers in 1D simulation with fitting values from experiments 7 and use the extracted parameters from software to calculate the RIN spectrum both theoretically and numerically. The RIN behavior of DFB and Fabry-perot (FP) lasers are simulated under pulse operation at room temperature.…”

Improvement of Power and Efficiency of High-Mesa Semi-Insulating InP: Fe Buried Heterostructure Lasers with Wide Bandgap Layers

“…A regular InGaAsP multiple quantum well (MQW) laser with a gain spectrum peak around 1.53 µm at 300 K was used for modeling [31]. The laser consists of an n-InP substrate, a 1.5 µm thick n-cladding layer, an undoped active region with 3 wells and 4 barriers sandwiched between a 100 nm thick undoped separate confinement heterostructure (SCH) layer, a 1.5 µm thick p-cladding layer and a 230 nm thick p-contact layer.…”

“…The active and passive region parameters for the SIBH laser simulation are listed in Table A1, derived from the experimental fitting values [31]. Other material parameters adopt the default settings in LASTIP.…”