Efficient emission of InGaN-based light-emitting diodes: toward orange and red Download: 920次
1. INTRODUCTION
Red-green-blue (RGB) micro light-emitting diode (LED) displays and related applications are attracting extensive attention in recent years because of their outstanding features [1–
It is known that the efficiency of InGaN-based LEDs decreases rapidly with increasing wavelength, which is probably due to the increase in indium content in the multi-quantum wells (MQWs). A QW with longer wavelength requires higher indium content and lower growth temperature, which forms more dislocations, point defects, and severe phase separation, and ultimately leads to an increase in non-radiative recombination and lower efficiency [16,17]. The blue and green InGaN-based LEDs are very efficient to date. The typical value of peak wall-plug efficiency (WPE) is for 448 nm blue at [18] and for 534 nm green at [19]. However, the WPE of InGaN-based orange or red LEDs is below 2.5% [20
By improving the material quality, reducing the compressive strain of InGaN QWs, and enhancing hole injection by three-dimensional (3D) p-n junctions with V-pits, we have successfully pushed the peak WPE of 574 nm yellow LEDs to 33% at [27]. It is expected to have a good result if we apply the InGaN-based yellow LED technology to orange and red ones. In this paper, based on our previous work on InGaN-based yellow LEDs [27], we attempted to extend the efficient emission of InGaN QWs from yellow to orange and red; as a result, a significant advancement was made.
2. METHODS AND RESULTS
The InGaN-based orange LED films were grown on patterned silicon(111) substrates by a self-designed, metal-organic, chemical vapor deposition reactor [28]. The epi-structure was similar to that of the yellow LED reported previously [27], which consisted of a 2.8 μm n-GaN layer, 32 periods of 5 nm -GaN superlattices, nine periods of 2.5 nm GaN orange MQWs, a 10 nm electron block layer (EBL), and a 130 nm p-GaN layer. Compared with the yellow LEDs, the only change in material growth was to reduce the growth temperature of yellow QWs from 780°C to 760°C for orange LEDs. The schematic structure is illustrated in Fig.
Fig. 1. Schematic epi-structures of InGaN-based orange LEDs on silicon(111) substrates: (a) Sample A with nine orange QWs and (b) Sample B with two orange QWs and seven yellow QWs. (c) TEM image of a cross section near the active region of Sample B. For easier presentation, the full thicknesses of n-GaN and p-GaN are not shown.
To emphasize the importance of V-pit in InGaN-based LEDs, especially for long wavelength emission, a V-pit is added in the drawing of the structure. Besides the benefits of “3D p-n junction” to screen dislocations and enhance hole injection [29
Even though material growth was based on the optimized methods of yellow QWs, it was still very hard to grow high-quality InGaN orange QWs. The QW quality is not only determined by the indium content of each QW, but also by the accumulated indium amount of all the QWs. With such a high indium content and so many periods, the material quality of the active region is presumed to be worsened with the growth of more orange QWs. An optimized LED structure was proposed, as illustrated in Fig.
The two LED samples, denoted as Sample A and Sample B, were fabricated into LED chips with a size of and a roughened top surface and silver (Ag) reflector-coated backside via the reported film transferring technique [27,34,35]. A direct current power supply (Keithley 2635) and a spectrometer (Instrument Systems CAS140CT) equipped with an integrating sphere (Instrument Systems ISP250-211) were used for electroluminescence (EL) tests. A light source (Nikon Intensilight C-HGFI) was used for fluorescence luminescence (FL) tests.
Figures
Fig. 2. Room temperature electroluminescence spectra of (a) Sample A and (b) Sample B, where lines 1 to 9 correspond to a current density of 0.4, 0.8, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.5, 7.5, and , respectively.
The WPE of the two samples at different current densities is plotted in Fig.
Fig. 3. (a) Room temperature dependence of WPE on the current density of InGaN-based orange LEDs on silicon(111) substrates. Emission photos of (b) Sample B and (c) Sample A driven at a current density of .
With a reduced number of orange QWs, Sample B has a much higher efficiency than Sample A, especially at low current densities. The peak WPE of Sample A is increased to 24.0%, where the current density is and the wavelength is 608 nm. Compared with the WPE of Sample A (16.0%) at the same current density and with the same wavelength of 608 nm, a 50% improvement is made for Sample B. The luminescence images of the two samples driven at are presented in Figs.
Generally, an increase in peak efficiency means an improvement in the quality of the QWs [37]. When comparing the FL images, Sample A shows a non-uniform red emission with many dark regions in Fig.
Fig. 4. Fluorescence luminescence images of InGaN-based orange LEDs on silicon(111) substrates, (a) Sample A and (b) Sample B, under an excited lamp source with a wavelength range from 510 to 560 nm.
The efficiency depends closely on the carrier recombination which is influenced by a change in the structure [40]. It is known that the energy gap of an orange QW is narrower than that of a yellow QW. With the help of V-pits for hole injection, most carrier recombination is believed to have occurred in the orange QWs at low current densities, and the active recombination volume is reduced in Sample B. It is known that current and active recombination volume can be expressed as follows: where is the current density, is the elementary charge, is the active recombination volume, is the current injected area, is the radiative recombination rate, and is the non-radiative recombination rate. As a result, for Sample B, the radiative recombination rate in the orange QWs can be greatly enhanced due to the suppressed non-radiative recombination caused by the quality improvement of the orange QWs and the decrease in active recombination volume (when the driven current density is the same). Therefore, the WPE of Sample B is much higher than that of Sample A at low current densities.
Adopting the structure of Sample B, a series of InGaN-based LEDs with various wavelengths ranging from orange to red were successfully developed on silicon(111) substrates. All the samples have the same structure as Sample B, and the only change was to adjust the growth temperature of QW7 and QW8.
The dependence of room temperature EL properties including WPE, full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the emission spectrum, and the voltage on the peak wavelength are plotted in Fig.
Fig. 5. Dependence of (a) WPE, (b) FWHM, and (c) voltage on the peak wavelength of InGaN-based orange and red LEDs at room temperature and at a current density of .
It should be pointed out that the LED chips in this paper are of normal size (), which is much larger than that of micro LEDs. Our micro LED chip technology is still under development.
3. CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, we conducted research on InGaN-based orange and red LEDs based upon the structure of InGaN-based yellow LEDs. Instead of changing all the yellow QWs to orange ones, we proposed an optimized QW structure that only changes two of the nine yellow QWs to orange ones. The LED with the optimized structure was found to be much more efficient, and it achieved a record high WPE of 24.0% with a peak wavelength of 608 nm at . The enhanced efficiency is attributed to the improved quality of the orange QWs and the decreased active recombination volume. Based on the optimized QW structure, a series of efficient InGaN-based orange and red LEDs, with peak wavelengths from 594 nm to 621 nm and corresponding WPE from 30.1% to 16.8% at , were successfully developed. The results show that the material quality of InGaN-based red LEDs is very close to meeting the demands of micro display. With the development of micro LED chip technology and a further improvement in material growth, it is believed that InGaN-based red LEDs for micro display are feasible in the near future.
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Article Outline
Shengnan Zhang, Jianli Zhang, Jiangdong Gao, Xiaolan Wang, Changda Zheng, Meng Zhang, Xiaoming Wu, Longquan Xu, Jie Ding, Zhijue Quan, Fengyi Jiang. Efficient emission of InGaN-based light-emitting diodes: toward orange and red[J]. Photonics Research, 2020, 8(11): 11001671.