Development and Production of DVD and CD Laser Epi Wafers

摘要

The market for DVD and CD equipment has been expanding rapidly. One of the key devices for DVD and CD equipment is the semiconductor laser diode, which is used for reading and writing the information to/from the media disks at high speed with high density. The laser diodes are manufactured from "epi- wafers" which have a multilayer structure grown on gallium arsenide (GaAs) substrates. Since the properties of the laser diode strongly depend on the quality of the epi-wafer, development has intensified. Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. has developed and started the production of the epi-wafers for lasers at the wavelength range of 650 nm and 780 nm for the DVD and CD applications, respectively.