APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS

VOLUME 81, NUMBER 14

30 SEPTEMBER 2002

Low-threshold-current-density 1300-nm dilute-nitride quantum well lasers

Nelson Tansu,a) Nicholas J. Kirsch, and Luke J. Mawst
Reed Center for Photonics, Department of Electrical Computer Engineering, University of WisconsinMadison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1691

Received 23 April 2002; accepted 13 August 2002 Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition-grown In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 quantum well QW lasers have been realized, at an emission wavelength of 1.295 m, with threshold and transparency current densities as low as 211 A/cm2 for L 2000 m and 75 A/cm2 , respectively. The utilization of a tensile-strained GaAs0.67P0.33 buffer layer and GaAs0.85P0.15 barrier layers allows a highly-compressively-strained In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW to be grown on a high-Al-content lower cladding layer, resulting in devices with high current injection efciency ( inj97%. 2002 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.1511290

The dilute-nitride quantum well QW on GaAs substrate, to achieve 1300-nm wavelength emission, has been a very promising choice active region in realizing highperformance long-wavelength GaAs-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers VCSELs.112 Less temperature sensitivity in InGaAsN QW lasers, at 1300 nm, has also been demonstrated in many of the published results.112 Although the area of temperature sensitivity in InGaAsN QW lasers is still under extensive investigation,13,14 promising results of both low threshold-current-density ( J th) and high T 0 values 1/ T 0 (1/J th) dJ th / dT have been demonstrated.3,6,12 Recently, efforts to achieve high performance InGaAsN QW lasers by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition MOCVD37 have been pursued. The advantage of the MOCVD-grown InGaAsN QW lasers is the ease in growing high quality AlAs/GaAs distributed Bragg reectors by MOCVD, compared to molecular beam epitaxy MBE techniques, for realizing low-cost VCSELs. Only recently, MOCVD-grown InGaAsN QW lasers,37 at 1300 nm, have demonstrated comparable performances with the MBEgrown InGaAsN QW lasers.8 12 As shown in our earlier studies,3 tensile-strained buffer layers InGaPGaAsP are crucial for achieving highly strained InGaAsN QW lasers grown on thick, highAl-content 75% 85% AlGaAs lower cladding layers. In the present work, we report very low threshold ( J th)and transparency ( J th)-current-density, strain-compensated In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW lasers with high current injection efciency ( inj) by utilizing strain compensation from GaAsP tensile-strained barriers and a thin GaAsP tensilestrained buffer layer. The lasers structures utilized here were all grown by low-pressure MOCVD. Trimethylgallium, trimethylaluminium, and trimethylindium are used as the group III sources and AsH3 , PH3 , and U-dimethylhydrazine UDMHy are used as the group V sources. The dopant sources are SiH4 and dielthylzinc for the n - and p -dopants, respectively. The laser structure, shown in Fig. 1, utilizes a 60- highly compressively-strained ( a / a 2.7% In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW, as the active region. The typical
a

peak photoluminescence wavelength of the 60- In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW is approximately 12901310 nm, with variations in emission wavelength resulted from run-torun variations and nonuniformity across the wafer. The lower- and top-cladding layers of the lasers consist of Al0.74Ga0.26As layers with doping levels of 1 1018 cm3 for both the n - and p -cladding layers, respectively. The growth temperatures of the n - and p -Al0.74Ga0.26As are 775 and 640 C, respectively. The annealing of the InGaAsN QW is accomplished during the growth of the top cladding layer at temperature of 640 C, with duration of approximately 27 min. This annealing condition does not represent the optimized annealing temperature and duration for the InGaAsN QW, yet this condition is sufcient for achieving strong luminescence from the QW. The InGaAsN QW is surrounded by tensile-strain barriers of GaAs0.85P0.15 ( a / a 0.6%, which are spaced 100 on each side of the QW. Earlier studies have demonstrated that the utilization of the GaAsP tensile-strained barriers surrounding the highlycompressively-strained InGaAsN QW results in improved optical luminescence.3 The tensile buffer for this structure consists of a 30- GaAs0.67P0.33 layer, which eliminates the poor interface of the InGaPGaAs in our earlier structures.3 One of the challenges in growing InGaAsN QW lasers by MOCVD is due to the difculties in incorporating N into the InGaAs QW, while maintaining a high optical quality lm. The low purity of the N precursor used in MOCVD U-DMHy is also suspected as a possible reason for the low optical quality of MOCVD-grown InGaAsN QWs. In order

Electronic mail: [email protected]

FIG. 1. Schematic energy bandgap diagram for the In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 GaAs0.85P0.15 QW laser structure with tensile buffer layer of 30- GaAs0.67P0.33 .

0003-6951/2002/81(14)/2523/3/$19.00 2523 2002 American Institute of Physics Downloaded 20 Jul 2011 to 128.180.137.141. Redistribution subject to AIP license or copyright; see http://apl.aip.org/about/rights_and_permissions

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Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 81, No. 14, 30 September 2002

Tansu, Kirsch, and Mawst

TABLE I. Performance and extracted intrinsic device parameters of In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW diode lasers with 100-m-stripe-width devices, and comparison with the published results on InGaAsN QW lasers. L m 3200 1000 770 1600 3000 800 960 1250 1000 750 1500 720 1000 2000 J th (A/cm2 ) 270 405 1500 546 1150 800 920 450 580 400 289 361 253 211
f g

Growth Livshits et al.a Ha et al.b Peng et al.c Wei et al.d Hohnsdorf et al.e Sato et al.f Kawaguchi et al.g Takeuchi et al.h Tansu et al.i Present Work MBE MBE MBE GS-MBE MOCVD MOCVD MOCVD MOCVD MOCVD MOCVD

J tr (A/cm2 ) 110 110 227 110 110 75 75 75

% 45 70 47 50 23 37 51 40 57 46 33

% 93 93 80 82 75 72 72 97 97 97

inj

i (cm 1 )
4 4 7 9.76 15 6 6 13 13 13

m 1.3 1.3 1.315 1.317 1.3 1.28 1.29 1.28 1.29 1.29 1.295 1.29 1.294 1.295

T0 K 75 75 65 104 122 60 150 205 110 130 82 88 90

T1 K 416 400 360 255 200

See Ref. 8 See Ref. 11 c See Ref. 12 d See Ref. 9 e See Ref. 7
b

See Ref. 5 See Ref. 6 h See Ref. 4 i See Ref. 3

FIG. 2. The room-temperature threshold current density ( J th) of the In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 GaAs0.85P0.15 QW as a function of inverse cavity length (1/L ). Downloaded 20 Jul 2011 to 128.180.137.141. Redistribution subject to AIP license or copyright; see http://apl.aip.org/about/rights_and_permissions

to incorporate sufcient N into the InGaAsN QW, very large DMHy/V as high as 0.961 is required. Due to the high cost and the low purity of the DMHy precursor, lowering the AsH3 /III to achieve large DMHy/V would be the preferable option to increasing the DMHy ow. Large DMHy/V ratio requires the AsH3 /III ratio to be rather low. Takeuchi et al.15 have demonstrated that the growth of InGaAs QW 1200 nm with the very low AsH3 /III ratio is signicantly more challenging compared to the case in which tertiary butyl arsine TBA is utilized as the As precursor. As the AsH3 /III ratio is reduced, the luminescence of the InGaAs QW reduces rapidly for low AsH3 /III below 15 20, which is, however, required for achieving sufciently large DMHy/V. These challenges have resulted in difculties in realizing high performance MOCVD-InGaAsN QW lasers with AsH3 as the As precursor until recently.3,4,6,7 In our approach, the design of the active region is based on strain-compensated InGaAsN QW, with very high In content In40% and minimum N content N0.5%, to achieve 1300-nm emission. Minimum N content in the InGaAsN QW allows us to grow the active region with an optimized AsH3 /III ratio. In characterizing our laser performance of the InGaAsN QW lasers, broad area lasers with stripe width of 100 m are fabricated. The conventional multilength studies of various broad area devices, with cavity length ( L ) ranging from 720 m to 3000 m, are utilized to extract the intrinsic device parameters. All the measurements of these broad area devices were performed under pulsed conditions with pulsed width of 6 s, and 1% duty cycle. All the measured parameters and extracted intrinsic device parameters for these lasers are summarized in Table I, under the section Present Work. The measured threshold current density, at room temperature of 20 C, for the InGaAsN QW lasers, is shown in Fig. 2 for various cavity length devices. The threshold- and transparency-current density are measured to be as low as 211 and 75 A/cm2 , respectively, for devices with cavity

length of 2000 m, and emission wavelength of 1.295 m. Even for shorter cavity devices of 720 m and 1000 m, threshold-current densities are measured to be as low as 361 and 253 A/cm2 , respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these data represent the lowest threshold- and transparencycurrent densities reported for InGaAsN QW lasers in the wavelength regime of 1.28 1.32 m as shown in Table I.112 The external differential quantum efciency ( d ) of the InGaAsN QW lasers, as shown in Fig. 3, is as high as 57% for devices with cavity lengths of 720 m. The lower d for the longer cavity devices is attributed to the relatively large internal loss ( i 13 cm1 ) for these unoptimized structures. The internal loss of the lasers may result from the combination of the narrow separate-connement-heterostructure SCH region and relatively high doping level (1 2 1018 cm 3 ) of the p -cladding of the laser. Reduction in the current injection efciency in QW lasers can result from large recombination in the SCH and also nonradiative processes in the interface between the SCHcladding layers. The poor interface between the InGaP buffer layer and GaAs SCH region in our previous structure is believed to have been responsible for the low current injection

Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 81, No. 14, 30 September 2002

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FIG. 3. The room-temperature inverse of the d of the In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 GaAs0.85P0.15 QW as a function of cavity length ( L ).

efciencies ( inj72% observed,3 resulting from nonradiative recombination in the interface. By utilizing a thin GaAsP buffer layer in place of InGaPGaAsP buffer layer,3 improvement in the current injection efciencies ( inj97% has been achieved as a result of the removal of the poor interface of InGaP buffer and GaAs SCH. The material gain parameter, dened as g oJ g th /ln(inj J th / J tr), is an important parameter in determining the gain properties of the QW. A low g oJ value for a QW laser can result from the low optical gain of material g oN g th /ln(nth / n tr) or the existence of nonradiative recombination in QW. The material-gain parameter ( g oJ ) 3 and the differential gain ( dg / dn ) 16 of the InGaAsN QW have been shown to decrease as nitrogen is introduced into the InGaAs QW. As shown in Fig. 4, the g oJ of the InGaAsN QW laser is measured to be 1150 cm 1 , which is signicantly lower that ( g oJ 1600 1900 cm 1 ) of similar InGaAs QW lasers2,3 at 1.171.19 m.

The In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW lasers, with emission wavelength of 1.291.295 m, exhibit relatively low temperature sensitivity, with T 0 values of 8290 K for devices with cavity length of 7202000 m at a temperature range of 20 60 C. The T 1 values 1/ T 1 (1/ d )( d d / dt ) are measured from 200 to 360 K, for devices with L of 720 2000 m. The expected length dependence of T 0 and T 1 is due to the variation of threshold gain with cavity length.13 In analyzing these T 0 values, one has to consider the fact that high-J th QW lasers with large monomolecular recombination will result in devices with high T 0 values.13 Relatively low T 0 values for low-J th InGaAsN QW lasers can result from carrier leakage,13 temperature-sensitive gain,13 and/or Auger recombination.14 In summary, high-performance strain-compensated In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW lasers, with a lasing emission wavelength of 1.295 m, have been achieved by MOCVD utilizing AsH3 as the As precursor. Threshold ( J th)- and transparency ( J tr)-current densities of the InGaAsN QW lasers have been measured to be 211 A/cm2 ( L 2000 m and 75 A/cm2 , respectively. The utilization of a thin GaAsP tensile-strained buffer layer results in devices with high inj of 97%. To the best of our knowledge,112 these thresholdand transparency-current densities as shown in Table I are the lowest values reported to date for 12801320 nm InGaAsN QW lasers. The authors would like to acknowledge discussions with Dr. M. R. Tan, Dr. D. P. Bour, Dr. S. W. Corzine, Dr. Y. L. Chang, and Dr. T. Takeuchi of Agilent Labs, Palo Alto.
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FIG. 4. Semilogarithmic linear regression of the modal gain ( g ) of the In0.4Ga0.6As0.995N0.005 QW as a function of logarithmic of the internal current density ( inj J ).

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