Integrated Active Thin-Film Cooling Demonstrated

Temperature variations are the primary cause of wavelength drift in laser sources for optical communications, leading to crosstalk and other sources of error. Thermoelectric coolers are a common solution, but they increase integration costs and can affect the lifetime and reliability of a component.

A team from the University of California in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz has demonstrated that integrated thin-film solid-state coolers are a viable alternative to the thermoelectric cooling of optoelectronic devices. Reporting in the November 2000 issue of Optical Engineering, the researchers described how layers of InGaAs and InGaAsP yielded cooling power densities of hundreds of watts per square centimeter in an InP PIN diode.