AOC moving forward : The impact of materials behavior

After some thirty years of materials analyses into the failure behavior of III-V semiconductor lasers, manufacturers of these devices still regularly encounter new failure mechanisms. This is due mainly to the implementation of progressively more complex and refined designs in devices that are, moreover, often subjected to increasingly more stressful operating or environmental conditions. It is therefore incumbent upon commercial laser manufacturers to maintain a persistent effort to search out and understand these new failure mechanisms, preferably before they are uncovered by an unhappy customer. Below, we describe our pursuit of a thorough materials-level understanding of VCSEL behaviors and illustrate some of the positive effects of these efforts.