VCSEL Thermal Sources: A Physics-Based Simulation Approach

Fully-comprehensive physics-based simulations of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) must account for the coupled electrical, optical and thermal problems. While electrical and optical solvers form the foundation of cold-cavity VCSELs modeling, self-heating has the strongest impact during the device operation. In this work, we present the capability of our in-house solver VENUS to model the wavelength redshift induced by temperature variations and show the spatial distribution of the primary thermal sources: Joule effect, free-carrier absorption, non-radiative recombinations and quantumwell capture. The spatial mapping of each source might allow to limit the impact of self-heating on the performance.