Thermal characteristics of high-power vertical cavity surface emitting laser array
Authors: Yan Guan-Xin , Hao Yong-Qin , Zhang Qiu-Bo ,   National Key Lab of High-Power Semiconductor Lasers, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun 130022, China
Published: December 2023

Due to the excellent characteristics such as good beam quality, dynamic single-longitudinal mode, low power consumption, and good wavelength stability, especially easy-to-integrate high-density 2D area arrays, vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) is widely used in optical identification, optical interconnection systems, optical data storage and other fields. In recent years, with the improvement of materials and process technology, VCSEL has played an increasingly important role in the fields of smartphone face recognition, drone obstacle avoidance, virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR), sweeping robots, home cameras, etc., and with the rapid development and application of 5G communication, VCSEL will become an indispensable main component. However, due to the introduction of distributed Bragg mirrors, the thermal effect of VCSEL is very serious, especially when VCSEL is integrated into an array device, current-induced self-heating of each individual array cell and the thermal coupling among array cells have become the major factors contributing to thermal rollover and hence restraining the optical output performance of the VCSEL arrays. Therefor it is of great significance to study the thermal characteristics of VCSELs, in order to solve the problem of thermal crosstalk between single-tube devices, and increase the life of the device. This paper analyzes the influence of cell spacing and arrangement on the thermal crosstalk phenomenon and thermal diffusion performance of VCSEL array device based on the finite element model. The simulation results show that the maximum temperature of the device decays exponentially with the increase of cell spacing, the thermal crosstalk phenomenon and thermal diffusion performance of VCSEL array devices are significantly improved. When the cell spacing is 120 μm, the influence between the cells is small, the thermal crosstalk phenomenon is significantly improved, and the heat dissipation effect is better. On this basis, four non-square VCSEL arrays with 16 cells are designed, and it can be seen that compared with the square arrangement, the isosceles triangle, pentagonal and hexagonal configurations have improved the thermal crosstalk phenomenon and thermal diffusion performance, and the overall temperature rise of the VCSEL array is significantly reduced. The thermal crosstalk phenomenon of the pentagonal arrangement is significantly improved, and the device temperature is 37.32 ℃, which is the best effect among several arrangement methods. According to the results of theoretical simulation, the VCSEL array devices with different arrangements are prepared and characterized on the same epitaxial wafer by the same process. From the <i>P</i>-<i>I</i>-<i>V</i> characteristic curves, it can be seen that the threshold currents of isosceles triangles, pentagons and hexagons are lower than those of the square arrangement, and the maximum output power is higher than that of the square arrangement, especially the maximum output power value of the pentagonal is 150 mW. The results show that the new arrangement can effectively improve the thermal crosstalk phenomenon between the cells, increase the output power of the device, and make the VCSEL array device have good optoelectronic and thermal characteristics.