Design and fabrication of 940 nm vertical cavity surface emitting laser single-emitter device

Abstract

As the key part of Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL), active region will seriously affect the threshold and efficiency of the device. To obtain appropriate laser wavelength and material gain, the In0.18Ga0.82As strain compensated quantum well is optimized design. The relationship between the lasing wavelength of multiple quantum wells (MQWs) and the thickness is calculated. Take into account the influence between the active region temperature and the lasing wavelength, the thickness of the quantum well is chose as 6 nm, the quantum barrier thickness is chose as 8 nm, corresponding to the lasing wavelength of 929 nm. The material gain characteristics of the MQWs under different temperature are simulated by Rsoft. The material gain exceeds 3300 /cm at 300 K, and the temperature drift coefficient of the peak wavelength is 0.3 nm/K. In this paper, Al0.09Ga0.91As and Al0.89Ga0.11As are selected as high and low refractive index materials of Distributed Braagg Reflector (DBR), and 20 nm graded layer is inserted between two types of materials. The influence of the graded layer thickness of DBR on the valence band barrier and reflection spectrum is calculated and analyzed. The increase of graded layer thickness can lead to the decrease of band barrier peak and the decrease of reflection spectrum bandwidth. The reflection spectrum and phase spectrum of P-DBR and N-DBR are calculated by the transmission matrix mode (TMM), the reflectance of DBR is over 99% and the phase shift is zero at 940 nm. The optical field distribution of the whole VCSEL structure is simulated, in which the standing wave peak overlaps with the active region, and the maximum gain can be obtained. Based on the finite element method (FEM), the effect of oxidation confined layer on the injection current is simulated. The current in the active region is effectively limited to the position corresponding to the oxidation confined hole, and its current density is stronger and more uniform. The optical field distribution in different modes of PC-VCSEL is simulated, different modes have different resonant wavelengths. The quality factor Q in different modes of VCSEL and Photonic Crystal-Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (PC-VCSEL) is calculated, Q of the fundamental mode is higher than higher transverse mode. It is demonstrated that the photonic crystal air hole structure can realize the output of basic transverse mode by increasing the loss of high order transverse mode. VCSEL and PC-VCSEL with oxidation hole size of 22 μm are successfully fabricated, in which the photonic crystal period is 5 μm, the air pore diameter is 2.5 μm and the etching depth is 2 μm. Under continuous current test, the maximum slope efficiency of VCSEL is 0.66 mW/mA, the output power is 9.3 mW at 22 mA, and the lasing wavelength is 948.64 nm at 20 mA injection current. Multiple wavelengths and large spectrum width is observed in the spectrum of VSCEL, which is an obvious multi-transverse mode. The maximum fundamental transverse mode output of PC-VCSEL reaches 2.55 mW, the side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) is more than 25 dB, and the spectrum width is less than 0.2 nm, indicating that the photonic crystal air hole has a strong control effect on the transverse mode, and the laser wavelength is 946.4 nm at 17 mA.