High‐power GaN‐based semiconductor lasers

GaN-based blue-violet lasers with a kink-free output power of higher than 150 mW have been successfully realized by adopting a new ridge structure and appropriately designing the beam divergence. The new ridge structure is a narrow 1.4 μm ridge covered with a stacked layer of Si on SiO2 and the beam divergence half-angles parallel and perpendicular to the junction plane are set at 8° and 21°, respectively. These lasers have been operating stably for more than 500 h under 130-mW pulsed operation at 60 °C. The empirical activation energy of device lifetime under 30-mW continuous-wave operation is 0.32 eV. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)