Multiphysical simulation of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

Since the lasing operation of VCSELs results from the interplay of mechanisms belonging to different physical worlds, a realistic model should include electron and hole transport, optical and thermodynamic descriptions. In this context, it is possible to find in the literature some remarkable examples of multiphysical VCSEL simulators, e.g., the one proposed by Streiff et al. of the Optoelectronics Group of ETH Zurich. However, most of these models, even if implemented in commercial simulators such as Sentaurus Device from Synopsys, are currently not supported nor documented. In an effort to fill this void, in this work we present our electro-opto-thermal VCSEL simulation approach. The carrier transport simulator solves the drift-diffusion equations, including quantum corrections to overcome the fully semiclassical description of the active region. The optical model, providing the device losses, emission wavelength and radiated field is the widely applied vectorial 3D Vcsel ELectroMagnetic (VELM) code, based on the coupled mode theory. The stationary thermal simulator solves the heat equations with a spectral element method, which exploits the features of the physical problem to minimize the number of basis functions required to provide an accurate temperature profile in the device. The presentation will focus on the workflow of such a comprehensive simulator, with particular emphasis on the coupling approaches between the different physical models, showing some preliminary comparisons with experimental results.