Life prediction of 808nm high power semiconductor laser by accelerated life test of constant current stress

High power semiconductor laser is widely used because of its high transformation efficiency, good working stability, compact volume and simple driving requirements. Laser’s lifetime is very long, but tests at high levels of stress can speed up the failure process and shorten the times to failure significantly. So accelerated life test is used here for forecasting the lifetime of 808nm CW GaAs/AlGaAs high power semiconductor laser that has an output power of 1W under 1.04A. Accelerated life test of constant current stress based on the Inverse Power Law Relationship was designed. Tests were conducted under 1.3A, 1.6A and 1.9A at room temperature. It is the first time that this method is used in the domestic research of laser’s lifetime prediction. Applying Weibull Distribution to describe the lifetime distribution and analyzing the data of times to failure, characteristics lifetime’s functional relationship model with current is achieved. Then the characteristics lifetime under normal current is extrapolated, which is 9473h. Besides, to confirm the validity of the functional relationship model, we conduct an additional accelerated life test under 1.75A. Based on this experimental data we calculated the characteristics lifetime corresponding to 1.75A that is 171h, while the extrapolated characteristics lifetime from the former functional relationship model is 162h. The two results shows 5% deviation that is very low and acceptable, which indicates that the test design is reasonable and authentic.