UC Santa Barbara

This work presents the first Nitride non polar Current Aperture Edge Emitting Blue Laser Diode (CA-LD) fabricated using the Photo-Electro-Chemical Etching (PECE) technique.

The main features of this design are represented by the deep etching of the laser diode ridge through the active region, the controlled etching of the active region by PECE and the increase of the p-contact area with respect to the active region area.

Preliminary experiments manifest that CA-LD has similar threshold current density, slope efficiency and peak output power of the more commonly used shallow etch ridge design and it has also shown a reduction in the series resistance down to ~40% with respect to the shallow-etch LDs indicating the potential of the CA-LD design in high-efficient, high-power, high-frequency LD applications.