Abstract

Electrically-driven photonic crystal (PhC) lasers have attracted much attention due to extremely small operating energy, which is an important issue to use the lasers in chip-to-chip and on-chip interconnections. We have employed ultra-compact buried heterostructure (BH), in which wavelength-scale active region is embedded with InP-based line-defect waveguide [1]. We call this a lambda-scale embedded active region PhC laser or LEAP laser. BH improves device performances because it provides good carrier confinement in active region and thermal conductivity [2,3]. To achieve electrical pumping, a lateral current injection structure was fabricated by using Si ion-implantation and Zn thermal diffusion into undoped InP layer. Thanks to combining the BH and PhC cavity, we have demonstrated an ultra-low threshold current of 4.8 A and operating energy of 4.4 fJ/bit [4].

© 2015 IEEE