High brightness (near diffraction-limited), multi_Watt semiconductor laser diodes have remained elusive in spite of huge investment in R&D over the past 3 decades. Such systems could offer high power integrated optics solutions in many applications including pump sources for telecoms applications.
We are developing an interactive supercomputer based semiconductor device simulation tool built on microscopic gain tables and very efficient optical propagation algorithms.
The simulator runs in parallel on our in-house SGI ONYX2 multi-processor shared memory machine and resolves optical, carrier and temperature fields within the 2D active region of the device. Inputs to the simulator include current and temperature profiles in the active layer computed from 3D electrical/thermal transport simulations.
