High reliability, high power arrays of 808 nm single mode diode lasers employing various quantum well structures

Single mode laser diode arrays operating at 808 nm have been designed and fabricated using several different waveguide and quantum well combinations. In order to operate these devices at 200 mW per element a quantum well intermixing process has been used to render their facets non-absorbing and thus they do not suffer from mirror damage related failure. In this paper we demonstrate extremely high levels of reliability for GaAs and AlGaAs quantum well devices with arrays of 64 elements completing over 6000 hours continuous operation without any single laser element failure and a correspondingly low power degradation rate of <1% k/hr. In contrast we show extremely high power degradation rates for arrays using InGaAs and InAlGaAs 808 nm quantum wells laser arrays.