In order to overcome catastrophic optical damage, decoupled confinement heterostructure (DCH) featuring a broadened waveguide and thin carrier block layers have been developed. Due to decoupling of carrier and optical confinement, a DCH laser can be designed more flexibly than a conventional separated confinement heterostructure laser, i.e., laser diodes can be designed with a variety of gain coupling factor (Gamma) (perpendicular), quantum-well number NW, keeping the beam divergence angle constant.