A tunable external-cavity InGaAs/AlGaAs quantum-well laser using a grating coupler monolithically integrated in a selectively disordered waveguide is demonstrated. The laser consists of an amplifier with a narrow channel for lateral single-mode guiding and a tapered section, a grating coupler for output beam collimation and wavelength dispersion, and an external half mirror. Selective quantum-well disordering technique using SiO2 caps of different thicknesses and rapid thermal annealing was employed to reduce the passive waveguide loss in the grating coupler region. Loss reduction from 40 cm-1 to 3 cm-1 was accomplished. Resultant increase of the grating coupler efficiency and expansion of the effective aperture length led to significant improvement of the laser performances. The maximum output power of 105 mW and wide tuning range of 21.1 nm centered at 997 nm were obtained. The well collimated output beam of full diffraction angles at half maximum of 0.16 0.18 was obtained.

In this paper, scattering problem of the grating coupler is analyzed by the mode-matching method in the sense of least squares for the gaussian light beam incidence. This coupler has a periodic groove structure of finite extent, which is formed on the surface of the core layer of the symmetric thin-film waveguide. In the present method, the approximate scattered fields of each region of the grating coupler are described by the superpositions of the plane waves with band-limited spectra, respectively. These approximate wave functions are determined by the minimization of the mean-square boundary residual. This method results in the simultaneous Fredholm type integral equations of the second kind for these spectra. The first and second order approximate solutions of the integral equations are derived analytically and the coupling efficiency and scattered fields are analyzed on the basis of those solutions. A qualitative and physical consideration for the scattering problem of the grating coupler is presented with the fundamental data derived from approximate solutions in this paper.