Modeling of TE cooling of pump lasers

The pump laser is a key module in optical amplifiers for long-haul fiber optic telecommunication systems. Its core component is a semiconductor laser diode mounted on a thermoelectric cooler. It is of crucial importance to maintain the laser diode temperature in a narrow range during operation in order to achieve satisfactory performance and reliability of the module. Therefore, a proper thermal management solution is very important to the pump module design. In this paper, a three-dimensional finite element analysis on thermoelectric cooling is presented. The modeling results show good agreement with the experimental results obtained by IR thermometry. When the heat source has a high power dissipation and a small footprint compared to the size of the heat sink, the spreading resistance becomes important. To analyze the maximum performance of the heat sink, both single and dual pump module configurations are considered.