Relative intensity noise of a quantum well transistor laser

Abstract

Reliability and low-frequency noise measurements of InGaAsP multiple quantum well buried-heterostructure lasers J.A quantum well transistor laser with a base cavity length L ¼ 300 lm has been designed, fabricated, and operated at threshold I TH ¼ 25 mA (0 C). As a consequence of the inherent advantage of the picosecond base recombination lifetime, the transistor laser is able to achieve nearly a quantum shot-noise limited laser relative intensity noise (RIN) with a peak amplitude of À151 dB/Hz at frequency 8.6 GHz. Compared with a diode laser (a charge storage device) at the same output power, the transistor laser (a charge flow device) has a better than 28 dB (number dependent on the laser device design) peak RIN advantage. V C 2012 American Institute of Physics.

Relative intensity noise in high-speed hybrid square-rectangular lasers

“…Considering that the system thermal noise N th is independent of the optical power, we can measure it by running the setup with the HSRL turned off while keeping the operation of the photodetector and amplifiers. Therefore, the intrinsic laser RIN can be determined by subtracting the thermal noise and photodetector shot noise from the total noise term [26]:…”

High current gain transistor laser

“…The majority of the electrons are consumed by stimulated light emissions, leading to a current gain which is a lot lower than the gain of a traditional transistor. The common emitter (CE) mode current gain (collector current/base current) is lower than 5 for most, if not all, of the TLs studied, either experimentally 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 10 or numerically 11 12 13 . The low current gain may limit the performance of systems that use TLs.…”

“…For example, in 2006, the paper2 reporting the first room temperature operation of TLs was voted as one of the five most important papers published by Applied Physics Letters in over 40 years5. Because of the transistor structure, many interesting characters have been demonstrated, including resonance free frequency response, large direct modulation band width6, voltage controlled mode of operation7, low relative intensity noise (RIN) close to the shot-noise limit8 and low 3rd order intermodulation distortion (IMD)9.…”

Effect of the energy barrier in the base of the transistor laser on the recombination lifetime

“…The recent development of the transistor laser 2-4 (TL) has been made possible by inserting a quantum well in the base of the heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT); 5 trading off the electrical gain for photon generation and employing a cavity to support stimulated emission. The first TL was reported 2 at 200 K and has since demonstrated room temperature continuous wave operation, 3 high-speed modulation, 4 signal mixing, 6 bandfilling and photon assisted tunneling, 7 drastically lower relative intensity noise compared to diode lasers, 8 and low-temperature vertical cavity operation via the use of selective lateral oxidation. 9 More recently, the edge emitting transistor laser has shown, through process optimization and stabilization, room temperature (up to 25 C) open-eye data transmission at 20 Gb/s utilizing both conventional current modulation (I B ) as well as voltage modulation (V CE ) through photon assisted tunneling.…”

“…As expected, due to higher confinement and increased recombination, sample B has $ 2.5Â the light output of sample A since there is a direct correspondence between b, I C , and light output. 8 The transition from the ground state to the excited state (E k 0 ! E k 1 , k 0 !…”