Tapered Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

The pervasive extension of semiconductor-based laser sources has been reaching application domains, such as lidar, material processing, metrology, and frequency doubling, where other laser sources are still prevalent because of the concurrent requirements of high power, high spectral purity, and high-beam quality. This chapter presents a review of the different modeling approaches that can be applied to tapered semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and explains the implementation of numerical model. The temperature distribution along the complete device is a relevant variable in the simulation of a tapered SOA due to the dependence of the gain and refractive index on the local temperature. The electrical equations are solved in the volume defined by the total thickness of the epitaxial layers, the amplifier length, and the chip width. The implementation of a steady-state quasi-3D model has been explained in detail, with emphasis on the interaction between the electrical, thermal, and optical solvers.