Low-power and high-speed operation capabilities of semiconductor membrane lasers — Energy cost limited by Joule heat

Abstract

The power consumption of a lateral current injection (LCI) type membrane distributed reflector (DR) laser under a high-speed direct modulation was theoretically investigated. As the results, we found that there is an optimal cavity length, which can be determined by the series resistance, to minimize the power consumption. For an example., an energy cost of 37 fJ/bit can be obtained at a modulation speed of 10 Gb/s for the cavity length of 17 μm when the grating coupling coefficient of 1800 cm-1 and the resistivity of p-InP cladding layer of 0.035 Ω·cm are used.