Longer life for blue lasers

摘要

In the space of just one year the developers at Osram Opto Semiconductors have managed to increase the service life of blue gallium-nitride lasers in continuous wave mode from two minutes to 143 hours. A significant factor in this success was the improvement in , the quality of the single-crystal semiconductor layers in the production of (aluminium-, indium-) gallium-nitride structures on silicon-carbide substrates. On the basis of the metal organic vapour phase epitaxy process, they were able to stimulate controlled epitaxial growth of highly-developed, single-crystal structures with layer thicknesses of just a few nanometers, thus significantly improving the efficiency of the light generation process.