Laser Diode - History

History

Coherent light emission from a semiconductor (gallium arsenide) diode (the first laser diode) was demonstrated in 1962 by two US groups led by Robert N. Hall at the General Electric research center and by Marshall Nathan at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The priority is given to General Electric group who have obtained and submitted their results earlier; they also went further and made a resonant cavity for their diode. The first visible wavelength laser diode was demonstrated by Nick Holonyak, Jr. later in 1962.

Other teams at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Texas Instruments, and RCA Laboratories were also involved in and received credit for their historic initial demonstrations of efficient light emission and lasing in semiconductor diodes in 1962 and thereafter. GaAs lasers were also produced in early 1963 in the Soviet Union by the team led by Nikolay Basov.

In the early 1960s liquid phase epitaxy (LPE) was invented by Herbert Nelson of RCA Laboratories. By layering the highest quality crystals of varying compositions, it enabled the demonstration of the highest quality heterojunction semiconductor laser materials for many years. LPE was adopted by all the leading laboratories, worldwide and used for many years. It was finally supplanted in the 1970s by molecular beam epitaxy and organometallic chemical vapor deposition.

Diode lasers of that era operated with threshold current densities of 1000 A/cm2 at 77 K temperatures. Such performance enabled continuous-lasing to be demonstrated in the earliest days. However, when operated at room temperature, about 300 K, threshold current densities were two orders of magnitude greater, or 100,000 A/cm2 in the best devices. The dominant challenge for the remainder of the 1960s was to obtain low threshold current density at 300 K and thereby to demonstrate continuous-wave lasing at room temperature from a diode laser.

The first diode lasers were homojunction diodes. That is, the material (and thus the bandgap) of the waveguide core layer and that of the surrounding clad layers, were identical. It was recognized that there was an opportunity, particularly afforded by the use of liquid phase epitaxy using aluminum gallium arsenide, to introduce heterojunctions. Heterostructures consist of layers of semiconductor crystal having varying bandgap and refractive index. Heterojunctions (formed from heterostructures) had been recognized by Herbert Kroemer, while working at RCA Laboratories in the mid-1950s, as having unique advantages for several types of electronic and optoelectronic devices including diode lasers. LPE afforded the technology of making heterojunction diode lasers.

The first heterojunction diode lasers were single-heterojunction lasers. These lasers utilized aluminum gallium arsenide p-type injectors situated over n-type gallium arsenide layers grown on the substrate by LPE. An admixture of aluminum replaced gallium in the semiconductor crystal and raised the bandgap of the p-type injector over that of the n-type layers beneath. It worked; the 300 K threshold currents went down by 10× to 10,000 amperes per square centimeter. Unfortunately, this was still not in the needed range and these single-heterostructure diode lasers did not function in continuous wave operation at room temperature.

The innovation that met the room temperature challenge was the double heterostructure laser. The trick was to quickly move the wafer in the LPE apparatus between different "melts" of aluminum gallium arsenide (p- and n-type) and a third melt of gallium arsenide. It had to be done rapidly since the gallium arsenide core region needed to be significantly under 1 µm in thickness. This may have been the earliest true example of "nanotechnology." The first laser diode to achieve continuous wave operation was a double heterostructure demonstrated in 1970 essentially simultaneously by Zhores Alferov and collaborators (including Dmitri Z. Garbuzov) of the Soviet Union, and Morton Panish and Izuo Hayashi working in the United States. However, it is widely accepted that Zhores I. Alferov and team reached the milestone first.

For their accomplishment and that of their co-workers, Alferov and Kroemer shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.