Temperature and current dependences of reliability degradation of buried heterostructure semiconductor lasers

Failure times of semiconductor lasers are usually lengthy under normal aging conditions. Determination of failure times typically involves extrapolation using a sublinear or linear model. It becomes increasingly difficult to experimentally determine activation energy and current exponent since data based on lower temperatures and lower stress currents are required. In this paper, the temperature and current dependences of 1310-nm buried heterostructure (BH) InP lasers were studied. We show that the activation energy of 1310-nm BH lasers based on life test data at 70°C-100°C is higher than the value of 0.4 eV suggested by Telcordia. The activation energies estimated by sublinear and linear models were 0.87 and 0.55 eV, respectively. We also show that the current exponents are 1.4 and 1.0, respectively, for sublinear and linear models. We discuss the implications of the reliability results in field reliability predictions.