Electrical Derivative Analysis on Current Leakage in Buried-Heterostructure Lasers

A full 2-D simulation was performed to investigate electrical derivative characteristics of 1.3μm AlGaInAs/InP buried-heterostructure semiconductor lasers with different current leakage paths and to explain their physical root causes. The simulation results match with experimental data under several different cases, and therefore could be used as guideline to explain device performance without any destructive failure analysis. Parameters extracted from electrical derivatives could be used as screening to catch devices with inferior performance and potential reliability risk.