Microchannel heatsinks for high average power laser diode arrays

Detailed performance results and fabrication techniques for an efficient and low thermal impedance laser diode array heatsink are presented. High duty factor or even CW operation of fully filled laser diode arrays is enabled at high average power. Low thermal impedance is achieved using a liquid coolant and laminar flow through microchannels. The microchannels are fabricated in silicon using a photolithographic pattern definition procedure followed by anisotropic chemical etching. A modular rack-and-stack architecture is adopted for the heatsink design allowing arbitrarily large two-dimensional arrays to be fabricated and easily maintained. The excellent thermal control of the microchannel cooled heatsinks is ideally suited to pump array requirements for high average power crystalline lasers because of the stringent temperature demands that result from coupling the diode light to several nanometers wide absorption features characteristic of lasing ions in crystals.