Self-heating in semiconductor lasers is often assumed negligible during pulsed operation, provided the pulses are ‘short’. However, there is no consensus on the upper limit of pulse width for a given device to avoid-self heating. In this paper, we present an experimental and theoretical analysis of the effect of pulse width on laser characteristics. First, a measurement method is introduced to study thermal transients of edge-emitting lasers during pulsed operation. This method can also be applied to lasers that do not operate in continuous-wave mode. Secondly, an analytical thermal model is presented which is used to fit the experimental data to extract important parameters for thermal analysis. Although commercial numerical tools are available for such transient analyses, this model is more suitable for parameter extraction due to its analytical nature. Thirdly, to validate this approach, it was used to study a GaSb-based inter-band laser and an InP-based quantum cascade laser (QCL). The maximum pulse-width for less than 5% error in the measured threshold currents was determined to be 200 and 25 ns for the GaSb-based laser and QCL, respectively.
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