Extraction of semiconductor intrinsic laser parameters by intermodulation distortion analysis

A new technique is described for the extraction of the intrinsic semiconductor parameters from intermodulation measurement of composite second-order (CSO) and composite third-order (CTB) distortion products. The effect of the parasitics elements are eliminated, by taking the distortion measurements at constant optical modulation depth, which enables one to obtain the laser parameters on packaged laser diodes. An optimization algorithm is then described that extracts the relevant laser parameters from the distortion data. This method was applied to a commercially available packaged laser diode and very good agreement was obtained between the measured and theoretical results.