Progress in several fields has enabled the use of LiDAR sensing for a multitude of applications like autonomous driving, pre-crash sensors, gesture recognition, and environmental monitoring. All the applications demand challenging specifications of the sensing system components to achieve the required performance parameters detection range, angular resolution, eye-safety, and several others. In this work, we report on recent advances in our pulsed edge-emitting IR laser diodes, which can be used as laser light sources for scanning-beam and flash-mode time-of-flight LiDAR systems. We developed a technique to reduce the temperature-induced emission wavelength shift in our monolithically stacked epitaxial waveguides from 22nm to only 2.8nm over a heatsink temperature range from 25°C to 120°C, which is the crucial temperature range for many systems. Within this 95K range our Fabry-Perot edge-emitters feature a wavelength shift below the 7nm usually achieved in DFB type edge-emitters and VCSELs. There is no power penalty for the wavelength stabilization. We also demonstrate output power scaling by about 60% by increasing the number of waveguide stages in the stacked epitaxy structure from 3 to 5. This results in a short-pulse peak output power of 260W at 50A from a single device with an emission wavelength of 910nm and a near field width of about 220μm. Finally, we discuss the performance improvements of devices with 900μm and 1200μm long resonators compared to standard 600μm resonators. The demonstrated advances of the pulsed edge-emitting laser light sources enable various system improvements and widespread adoption of LiDAR sensing in many applications.
Today, infrared semiconductor lasers are used in a variety of applications in conjunction with a large range of different operating conditions. We report on improvements of different lasers, each tailored to the specific application.
For cw laser bars, we report on efficiency improvements to further increase the output power beyond today’s power limits for reliable operation with 250 W. For long term use under q-cw conditions, we show a very cost effective approach using a 1.5 mm cavity, capable to provide 500 W. For sensing applications we report on 200 μm wide emitters providing 130 W of pulsed power, based on monolithically stacked laser structures.
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