Reliability of high-power diode lasers with oxide-defined stripes formed by pulsed anodization

Summary form only given. The key to producing low-cost, reliable, high power diode lasers is to use processes and techniques that are in themselves low cost, reliable, and simple to control. Pulsed anodization (PA) is a process that embodies these qualities for forming the current confinement stripe on high-power diode lasers. There have been several previous studies that have described the merits of the PA process. This work demonstrates, for the first time to our knowledge, that the native oxides formed by PA on GaAs-AlGaAs laser material produce diode lasers that have equivalent reliability (several thousands of power-on hours) to diode lasers made with chemical-vapor deposition (CVD) formed oxide. A comparison of the processing steps used to fabricate the diode lasers used in this study is shown.