All-polymer organic semiconductor laser chips: Parallel fabrication and encapsulation

Organic semiconductor lasers are of particular interest as tunable visible laser light sources. For bringing those to market encapsulation is needed to ensure practicable lifetimes. Additionally, fabrication technologies suitable for mass production must be used. We introduce all-polymer chips comprising encapsulated distributed feedback organic semiconductor lasers. Several chips are fabricated in parallel by thermal nanoimprint of the feedback grating on 4 wafer scale out of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and cyclic olefin copolymer (COC). The lasers consisting of the organic semiconductor tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum (Alq(3)) doped with the laser dye 4-dicyanomethylene-2-methyl-6-(p-dimethylaminostyril)-4H-pyrane (DCM) are hermetically sealed by thermally bonding a polymer lid. The organic thin film is placed in a basin within the substrate and is not in direct contact to the lid. Thus, the spectral properties of the lasers are unmodified in comparison to unencapsulated lasers. Grating periods of 378 nm to 428 nm in steps of 10 nm result in lasing at wavelengths of 622 nm to 685 nm. The operational lifetime of the lasers expressed in number of pulses is improved 11-fold (PMMA) and 3-fold (COC) in comparison to unencapsulated PMMA devices. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America