Integrated electroplated heat spreaders for high power semiconductor lasers

Thermal management of high power semiconductor lasers is challenging due to the low thermal conductivity of the laser substrate and the active device layers. In this work, we demonstrate the use of a microfabricated laser test device to study the thermal management of edge emitting semiconductor lasers. In this device, metallic heat spreaders of high thermal conductivity are directly electroplated on structures that mimic edge-emitting semiconductor lasers. The effects of various structural parameters of the heat spreader on the reduction of the thermal resistance of the laser test device are demonstrated both experimentally and theoretically. Without resolving to computational costive simulations, we developed two independent analytical models to verify the experimental data and further utilized them to identify the dominant thermal resistance under different laser mounting configurations. We believe our approach here of using microfabricated devices to mimic thermal characteristics of lasers as well as the developed analytical models for calculating the laser thermal resistance under different mounting configurations can potentially become valuable tools for thermal management of high power semiconductor lasers.