Structural optimization of reducing the thermal stress and Smile in packaging a high-power diode laser array on a microchannel cooler using gold-tin hard solder

With the development of laser technology, high power diode lasers have found the increasing various applications in many fields, including industry, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, Lidar and medical systems etc.. The near field non-linearity (Smile) and lasing uniformity of emitters for high power diode laser arrays are critical to high reliable optically coupled modules and laser heads in a cladding system. In order to obtain the lower smile and higher lasing uniformity, two CTEmatched substrates (Copper Tungsten-CuW) are employed to bond a single GaAs-based diode laser array with the cavity length of 2mm on a Micro Channel Cooler (MCC) using Gold-Tin hard solder. This double-CuW MCC-packaged structure is called DMCC which enables a diode laser array bonded on a CuW/MCC/CuW structure with all AuSn solder. Structural optimization has been carried out to reduce the thermal stress and smile for this package. Simulation results indicate that the smile and thermal stress is lowered 0.24μm and 16MPa, respectively. According to the simulation results, single bar DMCC-packaged diode lasers with lower Smile value are fabricated and characterized. The experimental results show that the ratio of Smile (average smile ~0.87μm) ⪅1μm is ~71% and higher ~19% than that of conventional structure (average smile ~1.2μm). Importantly, the quantity ratio of lasing emitters (≥46 emitters) in a diode laser array is significantly raised from ~62% to 85% after the optimization of CuW submount.