Numerical analysis on current and optical confinement of III-nitride vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

We report on the numerical analysis of the electrical and optical properties of current-injected III-nitride based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) with three types of current confinement schemes: the conventional planar-indium tin oxide (ITO) type, the AlN-buried type without ITO, and the hybrid type. The proposed hybrid structure, which combines an ITO layer and an intracavity AlN aperture, exhibits not only uniform current distribution but also enhanced lateral optical confinement. Thus, the hybrid type design shows remarkably better performance including lower threshold current and series resistance compared with the planar-ITO type and the AlN-buried type. Furthermore, the multi-transverse mode lasing behavior induced by strong index guiding of the AlN aperture is suppressed to single transverse mode operation by reducing the aperture size. Such design provides a powerful solution for the high performance III-N based VCSELs and is also viable by using current state of the art processing techniques.