Efficiency analysis of 808 nm laser diode array under different operating temperatures

Abstract

The 808 nm high-efficiency laser diodes have many advantages, such as high output power, high reliabilities, compact sizes, which are widely used in many areas, such as industry, communication, science, medicine and biology. In order to improve the power conversion efficiencies of 808 nm laser diodes, the following requirements must be considered, such as loss of joule heating, loss by the carrier leakage, spontaneous radiation loss below the threshold current, loss by interface voltage defect, internal losses including free-carrier absorption loss and scattering loss. These losses above are closely related to the operating temperature of laser diode. In this paper, power conversion efficiency analysis is demonstrated from the aspects of the output power, threshold current, slope efficiency, voltage, and series resistance at different temperatures.. This is the first time that the detailed study has been carried out under various temperatures (up to the lowest temperature of -40℃). And the detailed study above can be of benefit to designing the wafer epitaxial structure. High-power 808 nm laser diode arrays are mounted on conduction cooled heatsinks. And the laser chips have 47 emitters with 50% in fill factor, 100 m stripe in width and 1.5 mm in cavity length. The asymmetric broad waveguide epitaxial structure with lower absorption loss in p-type waveguide and cladding layer is designed in order to reduce the internal losses. The device performances are measured under operating temperatures ranging from -40℃ to 25℃ including the output power, threshold current, slope efficiency, series resistance, voltage, etc. Then the power conversion efficiency of 808 nm laser diode arrays are demonstrated from the output characteristics at different operating temperatures. With temperature decreasing, the series resistance gradually increases. The loss of joule heating ratio rises from 7.8% to 10.3%. In that case, the high series resistance is the major factor to prevent the efficiency from further improving at a low temperature of -40℃. As temperature decreases from 25℃ to -40℃, the carrier leakage ratio is reduced from 16.6% to 3.1%, the carrier leakage is the dominant factor for increasing efficiency, which means that it is necessary to optimize the epitaxial structure in order to reduce the carrier leakage at the room temperature. Comparing the two different work temperatures from -30℃ to -40℃, the carrier leakage ratio only changes 0.1%, which implies that the carrier leakage could be ignored under the low temperature. Meanwhile, as temperature decreases from 25℃ to -40℃, the power conversion efficiency increases from 56.7% to 66.8%.