IPRM11-thermal-Jacquet

In a semi-conductor optical amplifier (SOA) or laser, the performances that can be reached is strongly dependent on the chip temperature. For example, the optical output power of a laser or the optical gain in a SOA is reduced when the temperature of the junction increases. This latter can be controlled or monitored thanks to a thermo-electronic cooler (or a Peltier element) and a thermistor. In this paper, we calculate the thermal dissipation in semiconductor Optical Amplifier and laser. We investigate the effect of the material composition, the number of wells, the type of structure (Buried or Ridge), on the thermal resistance of the component and try to extract some rules towards minimization of temperature elevation. The influence of heat repartition inside the wells has been evaluated as well as the use of thick asymmetric cladding layer in the structure. In the latter case, optimization of layer composition and waveguide dimension has been performed. 2. THERMAL RESISTANCE CALCULATION In our calculation, we have used the thermal resistance as the basic property to characterize the thermal behavior of the components. The thermal resistance of a given structure can be found by using finite element method calculation. In our present study, since all the structures had a symmetry along the z axis, we have used numerical methods to solve two dimensional heat dissipation models to accurately determine the thermal resistances [1], [2]. For our simulations, we assumed that the active region delivers a power of 1W.