The Design and Fabrication of Ring Cavity Semiconductor Laser

by Wang, Chun-Kai

This paper presents design and fabrication of ring cavity semiconductor lasers with simple fabrication processes and good potential for integration. A 1.55-£gm symmetric quantum well InGaAsP epi-layer wafer is used to fabricate the lasers. The fabrication processes involve a bi-level deep etching to reduce the bending losses. Two geometric types of ring cavity semiconductor lasers have been investigated. For the type 1 ring cavity in the form of race tracks, two different designs are presented. One has a single ring resonator (SRR) design and the other has a coupled double ring resonators (DRR) design. The resonator of the type 2 ring cavity is formed between a cleaved facet and a loop mirror. Both a single ring resonator (SRR) design and a double ring resonator (DRR) design are presented for this type of cavity also. The maximum saturation output light powers of 0.479 and 0.409 mW are observed in room temperature L-I measurements for type 1 and type 2 ring cavity semiconductor lasers respectively. The spontaneous emission spectra of the type 1 ring cavity semiconductor lasers show a red-shift phenomenon under increasing drive currents. The type 1 ring cavity semiconductor lasers with ring resonators of 100 and 200 £gm radii have also been found to exhibit an interesting wavelength clamping phenomenon of the output light.