Developing a half-cladding semiconductor photonic device structure for surface transmission of light waves

A control of the light-wave properties is critical issue in developing attractive photonic devices. In conventional photonic devices such as semiconductor waveguide light sources, complicated techniques were required to fabricate the high-aspect-ratio artificial periodic structures that help controlling the light-wave properties. This is because the conventional photonic devices are constructed with thick cladding layers for an optical confinement. In this paper, we propose and fabricate a half-cladding semiconductor light source as an attractive photonic device structure. We successfully demonstrated a light emission from the light source under current injection at room temperature. With a half-cladding structure, the total thickness between the device surface and the top of the active layer is on the sub-μm scale. Controlling the light-wave properties should therefore be possible with artificial surface microstructures fabricated by a low aspect ratio process sequence.