Characteristics of red-emitting broad area stripe laser diodes with zinc diffused window structures

We have applied zinc diffused window structures to 640 nm broad area stripe laser diodes (BALDs) for the first time. A solid-phase zinc diffusion technique was used for a thick single quantum well (SQW) in GaInP employing the short wavelength and disordered active layer possessed a blue shift of 58 nm in photoluminescence spectrum. We fabricated 10 mm arrays including twenty-five BALDs and each BALD consists of a 60 μm ridge stripe and a 1000 μm cavity. An initial catastrophic optical damage (COD) level of the window laser was increased by four times of a conventional none-window laser. A long-term reliability under automatic current control was investigated for initial output powers of 13W and 15W which overcome a previous demonstration of 7.2 W. Measured degradations within a period of 1000-hours were 5 % or less, in contrast a half-life period of our conventional none-window laser with an initial output power of 10 W was only 120-hours. Therefore the window structure improved the BALD in terms of the COD level and the long-term reliability.