Design Considerations of Biaxially Tensile-Strained Germanium-on-Silicon Lasers

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed simulation-based study on the design optimization of biaxially tensile-strained germanium-on-silicon lasers, demonstrating significant improvements in threshold current, efficiency, and overall performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive modeling approach using LASTIP to optimize Ge laser structures, achieving substantial performance enhancements over existing experimental results.

Findings

Threshold current reduced by 22-fold

Differential efficiency increased by 11 times

Predicted wall-plug efficiency of 14.6% at 1mW output

Abstract

Physical models of Ge energy band structure and material loss were implemented in LASTIP(TM), a 2D simulation tool for edge emitting laser diodes. The model calculation is able to match experimental data available. Important design parameters of a Fabry-Perot Ge laser, such as the cavity length, thickness, width, polycrystalline Si cladding layer thickness were studied and optimized. The laser structure optimizations alone were shown to reduce Ith by 22-fold and increase the differential efficiency by 11 times. The simulations also showed that improving the defect limited carrier lifetime is critical for achieving an efficient and low-threshold Ge laser. With the optimized structure design (300 micron for the cavity length, 0.4 micron for the cavity width, 0.3 micron for the cavity thickness, and 0.6 micron for the polycrystalline Si cladding layer thickness) and a defect limited carrier lifetime of 100 ns, a wall-plug efficiency of 14.6% at 1mW output is predicted, where Jth of 2.8 kA/cm2, Ith of 3.3 mA, I_1mA of 9 mA, and differential efficiency of 23.6% can also be achieved. These are tremendous improvements from the available experimental values at 280 kA/cm2, 756 mA, 837 mA and 1.9%, respectively.