High brightness, 15.6 W, mini-bars, at 980 nm with Al free materials

We demonstrate high brightness mini-bars (emissive region is 2.6 mm wide) of tapered laser diodes, reported for the first time on Al free materials, with an output power of 15.6 W at 23.5 A, 20/spl deg/C, having a Gaussian far-field shape with a low divergence of 3.3/spl deg/ (slow axis FWHM). We have also high power mini-bars of broad area laser diodes with a high output power of 19 W at 25 A, 25/spl deg/C.