Secondary ions mass spectroscopy measurements of dopant impurities in highly stressed InGaN laser diodes

摘要

We performed a systematic secondary ions mass spectroscopy (SIMS) study of dopant impurities in life-time stressed InGaN laser devices in order to investigate the main degradation mechanism that is observed in nitride laser diodes. A continuous wave (cw) current density of 3 kA/cm2 was applied to InGaN laser diodes over an extended period of time and we observed the characteristic square root degradation of optical power. We compared the SIMS profiles of Mg, H, and Si impurities in the aged devices and observe that the impurities are remarkably stable over 10 000 h of cw operation. Nor is there any SIMS evidence of p-contact metals penetrating into the semiconductor material. Thus our SIMS results are contrary to what one would expect for impurity diffusion causing the observed square root degradation characteristic.