A variety of broad-area semiconductor laser devices are currently providing high-power with near diffraction-limited performance. These new devices share an important design element: the suppression of filamentation tendencies. Specific designs include traveling-wave amplifiers and reflective-wave amplifiers, tapered amplifiers, unstable resonator oscillators and most recently, curved or angled grating DBR/DFB oscillators. These latter designs offer the advantages of filament suppression and angular spectrum filtering, while providing strong spectral filtering as well. We will review the motivation and design principles for several of the new broad-area DBR/DFB devices and describe the algorithms that have been developed in order to provide accurate numerical simulations and performance predictions.
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