Reliability improvement of superluminescent diodes emitting at 1.0 spl mu/m band using InGaAsP barrier structure

A report is presented on the reliability evaluation of broad-band InGaAs superluminescent diodes emitting at 1.0 μm band wavelength. The devices using the InGaAsP barrier layer showed better reliability characteristics owing to the low optical power density in the active region, compared to the devices with using the GaAs barrier layer. In the lifetime test under auto-power-control mode at the output power of 30 mW at 25 μC, a noticeable degradation was observed in the devices with the GaAs barrier, while the devices with the InGaAsP barrier have shown almost no degradation over 3000 h.