Semiconductor Laser Engineering, Reliability and Diagnostics: A Practical Approach to High Power and Single Mode Devices

This book represents a well thought description of three fundamental aspects of laser technology: the functioning principles, the reliability and the diagnostics. From this point of view, and, as far as I know, this is a unique example of a book where all these aspects are merged together resulting in a well-balanced presentation. This helps the reader to move with ease between different concepts since they are presented in a coherent manner and with the same terminology, symbols and definitions.

The book reads well. It presents the necessary equations and derivations to understand both the physical mechanisms and the practicalities via a set of useful formulas. In addition, there is the more important aspect of many real-life examples of how a laser is actually manufactured and which the relevant parameters that determine its behaviour are. It impresses the amounts of information that are given in the book: this would be more typical of a thick handbook on semiconductor laser than of an agile book. Dr. Epperlein was able to identify the most important concepts and to present them in a clear though concise way.

I am teaching a course on Optoelectronics and I’m going to advise students to refer to this book, because it has all the necessary concepts and derivations for a systematic understanding of semiconductor lasers with many worked-out examples, which will help the student to grasp the actual problems of designing, manufacturing, testing and using semiconductor lasers. All the various concepts are joined to very useful figures, which, if provided to instructors as files, can be a useful add-on for the use of the book as text for teaching. Concepts are always detailed with numbers to give a feeling of their practical use.

In conclusion, I do find the book suitable for my teaching duties and will refer it to my students.
— Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Pavesi, Head of the Department of Physics, University of Trento, Italy, 31 May 2013

Dr. Epperlein has done the semiconductor laser community a great service, by releasing the most complete book on the market on the practical issues of how to make reliable semiconductor lasers. …

The results are at the cutting edge of our understanding of semiconductor laser reliability today, and go well beyond the empirical “black box” approach many use of “try everything, and see what works.” The author did a fine job of pulling together material from many disparate fields.

Dr. Epperlein has particular expertise in high power single mode semiconductor lasers, and those working on those type of lasers will be especially interested in this book, as there has never been a book published on the fabrication and qualification of such lasers before. However, those in almost any field of semiconductor lasers will learn items of interest about device design, fabrication, reliability, and characterization. …

This book is written more as a “how to” manual, which should make it more accessible and useful to development engineers and researchers in the field. As with many books of this type, it is not necessary to read it from cover-to-cover, it is best skimmed, with deep diving into any areas of special interest to the reader. The book is remarkable also, for how comprehensive it is – even experts will discover something new and useful.

Dr. Epperlein’s book is an essential read for anyone looking to develop semiconductor lasers for anything other than pure research use, and I give it my highest recommendation.
—Dr. Robert W. Herrick, Senior Component Reliability Engineer, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA, USA. July 6, 2013.

The book closes the gap in the current book literature and is thus a unique and excellent example of how to merge design, reliability and diagnostics aspects in a very professional, profound and complete manner. …

All physical and technological principles, concepts and practical aspects required for developing and fabricating highly-reliable high-power single-mode laser products are precisely specified and skilfully formulated along with all the necessary equations, figures, tables and worked-out examples making it easy to follow through the nine chapters.

Hence, this unique book is a milestone in the diode laser literature and is an excellent reference book for not only diode laser researchers and engineers, but also diode laser users. …

The book has an elaborate table of contents and index, which are very useful, over 200 illustrative figures and tables, and extensive lists of references to all technical topics at the end of each of the nine chapters, which make it easy to follow from cover to cover or by jumping in at random areas of special interest. Moreover, experimental and theoretical concepts are always illustrated by practical examples and data. …

I can highly recommend this extremely relevant, well-structured and well-formulated book to all practising researchers in industrial and academic diode laser R&D environments and to post-graduate engineering students interested in the actual problems of designing, manufacturing, testing, characterising and qualifying diode lasers. …

Due to its completeness and novel approach to combine design, reliability and diagnostics in the same book, it deserves to be welcomed wordwide by the addressed audience.
—Dr. Chung-en Zah, Research Director S&T Division, Corning Inc., Corning NY, USA. June 23, 2013

This book is a landmark in the recent literature on semiconductor lasers because it fills a longstanding gap between many excellent books on laser theory and the complex and challenging endeavour to fabricate these devices reproducibly and reliably in an industrial, real world environment. …

I appreciate the competent, complete and skilful presentation of the three highly interrelated critical topics of state-of-the-art power laser research – device and mode stability engineering, reliability mechanisms/reliability assessment strategies and material/device diagnostics all treated with a strong focus on the implementation. This emphasis on the complex practical aspects for a large-scale power laser fabrication is a true highlight of the book. …

The subtle interplay between laser design, reliability strategies, advanced failure analysis and characterization techniques is elaborated in a very rigorous and scientific way using a very clear and easy to read representation of the complex interrelation of the three major topics. I will concentrate on the numerous highlights. …

The completeness of the presentation on power laser diode design based on basic physical and plausible arguments is mainly based on analytic mathematical relations as well as experiments providing a new and well-balanced addition for the power diode laser literature in particular. …

The novel and really original, “gap-filling” bulk of the book is elaborated in a very clear way in the four chapters in part 2 “Laser Reliability” on laser degradation physics and mirror design and passivation at high power, followed then by two very application oriented chapters on reliability design engineering and practical reliability strategies and implementation procedures. This original combination of integral design and reliability aspects, which are mostly neglected in standard literature, is certainly a major plus of this book. I liked part 2 as a whole, because it provides excellent insights in degradation physics on a high level and combines it in an interesting and skilful way with the highly relevant reliability science and testing strategies, which is particularly important for devices operating at extreme optical stresses with challenging lifetime requirements in a real word environment. …

Part 3 “Laser Diagnostics” … is devoted to advanced experimental diagnostics techniques for material integrity, mechanical stress, deep level defects, various dynamic laser degradation effects, surface- and interface quality, and most importantly heating and disordering of mirrors and mirror coatings. The topics of these techniques … have been pioneered by the author for the specific applications over many years guaranteeing many competent and well- represented insights. These techniques are brilliantly discussed and the information distributed in many articles by the author has been successfully unified in this book.

I consider the parts 2 and 3 on reliability and diagnostics as the most valuable and true novel contribution of the book, which in combination with the extremely well covered laser design of part 1 clearly fill the gap in the current diode laser literature, which in this detail has certainly been neglected in the past.

In summary, I can highly recommend this excellent, well-organized and clearly written book to readers who are already familiar with basic diode laser theory and who are active in the academic and industrial fabrication and characterization of semiconductor lasers. Due to its completeness, it also serves as an excellent reference of the current state-of-the-art in reliability engineering and device and material diagnostics.

Needless to mention that the quality of the book, its representations and methodical structure meet the highest expectation and are certainly a tribute from the long and broad experience of the author in academic laser science and the industrial commercialization of high power diode lasers.

This book was a pleasure to read and due to its quality and relevance deserves a large audience in the power diode laser community!
—Prof. em. Dr. Heinz Jäckel, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich, Switzerland. June 16, 2013

This book represents a well thought description of three fundamental aspects of laser technology: the functioning principles, the reliability and the diagnostics. From this point of view, and, as far as I know, this is a unique example of a book where all these aspects are merged together resulting in a well-balanced presentation. This helps the reader to move with ease between different concepts since they are presented in a coherent manner and with the same terminology, symbols and definitions.

The book reads well. It presents the necessary equations and derivations to understand both the physical mechanisms and the practicalities via a set of useful formulas. In addition, there is the more important aspect of many real-life examples of how a laser is actually manufactured and which the relevant parameters that determine its behaviour are. It impresses the amounts of information that are given in the book: this would be more typical of a thick handbook on semiconductor laser than of an agile book. Dr. Epperlein was able to identify the most important concepts and to present them in a clear though concise way.

I am teaching a course on Optoelectronics and I’m going to advise students to refer to this book, because it has all the necessary concepts and derivations for a systematic understanding of semiconductor lasers with many worked-out examples, which will help the student to grasp the actual problems of designing, manufacturing, testing and using semiconductor lasers. All the various concepts are joined to very useful figures, which, if provided to instructors as files, can be a useful add-on for the use of the book as text for teaching. Concepts are always detailed with numbers to give a feeling of their practical use.

In conclusion, I do find the book suitable for my teaching duties and will refer it to my students.
―Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Pavesi, Head of the Department of Physics, University of Trento, Italy, 31 May 2013

Dr. Epperlein has done the semiconductor laser community a great service, by releasing the most complete book on the market on the practical issues of how to make reliable semiconductor lasers….

The results are at the cutting edge of our understanding of semiconductor laser reliability today, and go well beyond the empirical “black box” approach many use of “try everything, and see what works.” The author did a fine job of pulling together material from many disparate fields.

Dr. Epperlein has particular expertise in high power single mode semiconductor lasers, and those working on those type of lasers will be especially interested in this book, as there has never been a book published on the fabrication and qualification of such lasers before. However, those in almost any field of semiconductor lasers will learn items of interest about device design, fabrication, reliability, and characterization….

This book is written more as a “how to” manual, which should make it more accessible and useful to development engineers and researchers in the field. As with many books of this type, it is not necessary to read it from cover-to-cover, it is best skimmed, with deep diving into any areas of special interest to the reader. The book is remarkable also, for how comprehensive it is – even experts will discover something new and useful.

Dr. Epperlein’s book is an essential read for anyone looking to develop semiconductor lasers for anything other than pure research use, and I give it my highest recommendation.
―Dr. Robert W. Herrick, Senior Component Reliability Engineer, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA, USA. July 6, 2013.

The book closes the gap in the current book literature and is thus a unique and excellent example of how to merge design, reliability and diagnostics aspects in a very professional, profound and complete manner….

All physical and technological principles, concepts and practical aspects required for developing and fabricating highly-reliable high-power single-mode laser products are precisely specified and skilfully formulated along with all the necessary equations, figures, tables and worked-out examples making it easy to follow through the nine chapters.

Hence, this unique book is a milestone in the diode laser literature and is an excellent reference book for not only diode laser researchers and engineers, but also diode laser users….

The book has an elaborate table of contents and index, which are very useful, over 200 illustrative figures and tables, and extensive lists of references to all technical topics at the end of each of the nine chapters, which make it easy to follow from cover to cover or by jumping in at random areas of special interest. Moreover, experimental and theoretical concepts are always illustrated by practical examples and data….

I can highly recommend this extremely relevant, well-structured and well-formulated book to all practising researchers in industrial and academic diode laser R&D environments and to post-graduate engineering students interested in the actual problems of designing, manufacturing, testing, characterising and qualifying diode lasers….

Due to its completeness and novel approach to combine design, reliability and diagnostics in the same book, it deserves to be welcomed wordwide by the addressed audience.
―Dr. Chung-en Zah, Research Director S&T Division, Corning Inc., Corning NY, USA. June 23, 2013

This book is a landmark in the recent literature on semiconductor lasers because it fills a longstanding gap between many excellent books on laser theory and the complex and challenging endeavour to fabricate these devices reproducibly and reliably in an industrial, real world environment….

I appreciate the competent, complete and skilful presentation of the three highly interrelated critical topics of state-of-the-art power laser research – device and mode stability engineering, reliability mechanisms/reliability assessment strategies and material/device diagnostics all treated with a strong focus on the implementation. This emphasis on the complex practical aspects for a large-scale power laser fabrication is a true highlight of the book….

The subtle interplay between laser design, reliability strategies, advanced failure analysis and characterization techniques is elaborated in a very rigorous and scientific way using a very clear and easy to read representation of the complex interrelation of the three major topics. I will concentrate on the numerous highlights…. The completeness of the presentation on power laser diode design based on basic physical and plausible arguments is mainly based on analytic mathematical relations as well as experiments providing a new and well-balanced addition for the power diode laser literature in particular….

The novel and really original, “gap-filling” bulk of the book is elaborated in a very clear way in the four chapters in part 2 “Laser Reliability” on laser degradation physics and mirror design and passivation at high power, followed then by two very application oriented chapters on reliability design engineering and practical reliability strategies and implementation procedures. This original combination of integral design and reliability aspects, which are mostly neglected in standard literature, is certainly a major plus of this book. I liked part 2 as a whole, because it provides excellent insights in degradation physics on a high level and combines it in an interesting and skilful way with the highly relevant reliability science and testing strategies, which is particularly important for devices operating at extreme optical stresses with challenging lifetime requirements in a real word environment….

Part 3 “Laser Diagnostics” … is devoted to advanced experimental diagnostics techniques for material integrity, mechanical stress, deep level defects, various dynamic laser degradation effects, surface- and interface quality, and most importantly heating and disordering of mirrors and mirror coatings. The topics of these techniques … have been pioneered by the author for the specific applications over many years guaranteeing many competent and well- represented insights. These techniques are brilliantly discussed and the information distributed in many articles by the author has been successfully unified in this book.

I consider the parts 2 and 3 on reliability and diagnostics as the most valuable and true novel contribution of the book, which in combination with the extremely well covered laser design of part 1 clearly fill the gap in the current diode laser literature, which in this detail has certainly been neglected in the past.

In summary, I can highly recommend this excellent, well-organized and clearly written book to readers who are already familiar with basic diode laser theory and who are active in the academic and industrial fabrication and characterization of semiconductor lasers. Due to its completeness, it also serves as an excellent reference of the current state-of-the-art in reliability engineering and device and material diagnostics.

Needless to mention that the quality of the book, its representations and methodical structure meet the highest expectation and are certainly a tribute from the long and broad experience of the author in academic laser science and the industrial commercialization of high power diode lasers.

This book was a pleasure to read and due to its quality and relevance deserves a large audience in the power diode laser community!
―Prof. em. Dr. Heinz Jäckel, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich, Switzerland. June 16, 2013