Continuous-wave power of ground-state emission in quantum dot lasers with asymmetric barrier layers is studied. Unlike conventional lasers, the power is virtually unaffected by excited-to-ground state relaxation delay of carriers in quantum dots. © 2021 The Authors Semiconductor lasers present an important component for various applications ranging from telecommunication to medical uses. Conventional semiconductor lasers with a low-dimensional active region [Fig. 1(a)] suffer from parasitic electron-hole recombination that occurs in the optical confinement layer (OCL) [1][2][3][4]. To suppress this recombination outside the laser active region, two alternative approaches were proposed [5-12] -one based on double tunneling-injection (injection of both electrons and holes) into the quantum-confined active region and the other using asymmetric barrier layers (ABLs).Here we discuss the optical output of quantum dot (QD) lasers with ABLs. In such lasers, the active layer with QDs is clad on each side by a thin barrier layer [Fig. 1(b)]. The barrier layers are designed in such a way that they prevent from building up bipolar carrier (i.e., both electron and hole) population in the OCL. As a result of this, the parasitic electron-hole recombination in the OCL is suppressed in ABL QD lasers.As in conventional QD lasers [13], the QDs in ABL lasers may contain excited states in addition to the ground state. In this work, the optical power of ground-state emission in ABL QD lasers is studied in the presence of excited states in QDs. The most dramatic situation is considered in which the charge carriers injected into the OCL are not directly captured into the lasing ground state in QDs -they are first captured from the OCL into the excited state in QDs and then they relax from the excited state to the ground state [Fig. 1(b)].The rate equations model is used for the layered structures shown in Fig. 1. The electron and hole populations in the OCL, excited-state and ground-state in QDs, and the optical power are calculated as a function of the injection current.