A belief has changed: highly reliable 980-nm pump lasers for EDFA applications

Summary form only given. Until a few years ago, it was generally believed that GaAs/AlGaAs-based lasers were inherently unreliable. It has since been established by our Group that these lasers suffered from facet corrosion and, as a consequence, catastrophic optical mirror damage and that this can be eliminated by appropriate measures during chip processing. Our first-generation, high-power GaAs/AlGaAs 980-nm lasers have now been undergoing life testing for close to 45,000 h at power levels of between 150 and 200 mW and temperatures between 20 and 75°C. None of these lasers has failed yet, nor have more recent devices with chemical-vapor-deposited (CVD) mirror reflectivity modification layers. These results now clearly support our early finding that GaAs/AlGaAs-based high-power 980 nm lasers are extremely reliable and meet today´s requirements for EDFAs for terrestrial applications.