Yasuo Oeda

High-power InGaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes with decoupled confinement heterostructure

High power InGaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes with decoupled confinement heterostructure (DCH) have been developed. Almost Al-free waveguide and cladding layers were realized in 980 nm DCH laser diodes without degrading temperature characteristics. The extremely low electrical and thermal resistances allowed high power and efficient operation. The maximum CW output power as high as 9.5 W was obtained with 100-micrometer-aperture broad area. DCH laser diode. The maximum efficiency was 55% at 2.5 W. The series resistance of 1.8-mm long cavity was 0.04(Omega) and internal loss was 1.5 cm-1. The characteristic temperature (T0) was 155 K. The substantially Al-free DCH structure enables easy fabrication of various index guided laser diodes. We have developed two types of real index guided laser diodes, buried- ridge and self-aligned structure. Buried-ridge laser diode presented 1.3 W maximum CW output power and 500 mW single mode operation. Self-aligned structure laser diodes showed 1.4 W CW output power and 700 mW single mode operation with better reproducibility.

Characteristics and reliability of high-power InGaAs/AlGaAs laser diodes with decoupled confinement heterostructure

In order to overcome catastrophic optical damage, decoupled confinement heterostructure (DCH) featuring a broadened waveguide and thin carrier block layers have been developed. Due to decoupling of carrier and optical confinement, a DCH laser can be designed more flexibly than a conventional separated confinement heterostructure laser, i.e., laser diodes can be designed with a variety of gain coupling factor (Gamma) (perpendicular), quantum-well number NW, keeping the beam divergence angle constant.

Potential of DCH structure for higher brightness laser diode

Summary form only given. We have proposed the DCH structure for high power LDs. DCH, which stands for Decoupled Confinement Heterostructure, features a broadened waveguide and carrier blocking layer. The broad waveguide results in low Gamma and an ideal Gaussian shape optical mode. Providing carrier blocking layers makes it possible to freely design the optical guide system independently of the carrier confinement. The brightness that was achieved in the GaAs/AlGaAs LD was about twice as high as the market standard level. In this paper we introduce the potential of the InGaAs/AlGaAs-DCH structure for higher brightness LDs. Our concept is to realize the high brightness LD by using AlGaAs to obtain a high quality crystal and at the same time we adopt the DCH structure to reduce the resistance. This concept performs most effectively on InGaAs/AlGaAs LD from the perspective of material characteristics.

High-power 0.8 /spl mu/m-band broad-area laser diodes with a decoupled confinement heterostructure

The authors demonstrated high-power cw operation and long lifetimes of 0.8-/spl mu/m-band GaAs-AlGaAs DCH laser diodes.