Three-terminal Laser Research Articles

Mechanisms of carrier and energy injection in three-terminal laser structures

The mechanisms of injection in the recently proposed three-terminal laser structures and the ability to effectively tune the energy yield associated with a single injected electron are analyzed, by means of the ensemble Monte Carlo simulations, with respect to a high-speed modulation using dynamic carrier heating.

Three-terminal laser structure for high-speed modulation using dynamic carrier heating

A three-terminal laser structure is proposed as a means to achieve laser modulation using dynamic carrier heating. The injection of hot electrons, with energy tuned by variable joule heating over a high electric field region, is used to govern the carrier temperature in the active layer of a laser, while a separate heterojunction controls the injection rate. Simulations show the possibility of generating good-shaped picosecond optical pulses by modulating the voltage that controls the heating electric field.

Three-terminal bistable low-threshold strained InGaAs/GaAs laser grown on structured substrates for digital modulation

Strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum-well three-terminal lasers with monolithically integrated intracavity modulators were fabricated using low threshold current structures formed by the temperature engineered growth (TEG) technique. An on-off switching ratio of 556 was obtained for a 30-mV change in absorber voltage. An optical power contrast ratio of 7.5 was measured with a total DC power consumption of 25.3 mW. These results show a great improvement in the digital (on-off) switching performance of three-terminal lasers with intracavity modulators.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Small signal and continuous wave operation of the lateral current injection heterostructure field-effect laser

The lateral current injection heterostructure field-effect laser structure is operated both as a three-terminal laser and a field-effect transistor. The structure was grown by low-temperature molecular-beam epitaxy (580 °C) and excellent performance characteristics were obtained for both devices. The laser is shown to have both source/emitter and source/collector modes of operation. Both modes exhibited a continuous wave operation and the source/emitter mode has a −3 dB bandwidth of 4 GHz limited by heating caused by a high source resistance. The transistor had a peak transconductance of 95 mS/mm and a peak drain to source current density of 120 mA/mm for a 2μm×50 μm device.

Three-terminal operation of the double-heterostructure optoelectronic switching laser

The double-heterostructure optoelectronic switch is demonstrated as a three-terminal laser. The basic laser structure employs a graded index single quantum well (GRIN SQW) and implements the third-terminal injector as a self-aligned implant to the inversion channel. The implant simultaneously serves as the optical confining layer. Threshold currents of 500 A/cm2 are obtained and complete control of the switching characteristic is obtained with an input current density of 0.8 A/cm2.