Efficient Burn-in Process for High Power QCL Lasers

Raytum Photonics teams with the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) of University of Maryland in order to come up with an efficient burn-in process to effectively screen out infant mortality and accurately predict life time for QCL lasers in shortest possible time.   The proposed burn-in process is based on an accelerated degradation model which speeds up the burn-in process by elevated chip temperature, higher operating current and soft current cycling. The effort will be supported by QCL device experts of Thorlabs Quantum Electronics to further improve the empirical model by having better insight into the fundamental degradation mechanisms. A cost effective automatic power-monitored burn-in system is also proposed which can be scaled up for deployment at production line.   An added “break-in” stage can reveal more information about how the devices ages. A good size of coated QCL laser samples will be burn-in by four controlled groups to validate the proposed degradation model at phase I.