Improved Output Power Behavior of Ultraviolet GaN-Based Light-Emitting Diode By Using Agpdcu Reflector

Abstract

GaN-based ultraviolet UVLEDs have attracted a great deal of interest because of their applications in water and air purification and solid-state lighting. These applications have stimulated the technological development of high-efficiency UVLEDs. On the one hand, UVLEDs exhibit relatively lower external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) than visible LEDs. In particular, high-power UVLEDs should have high light extraction and heat dissipation efficiencies. For the flip-chip (FC) LEDs, the fabrication of high-performance p-type reflector with low contact resistance and high reflectivity is reqyired. Silver (Ag) is a commonly adopted p-type reflector for near UV LEDs but suffers from thermal instability, namely, agglomerated when annealed in air above 300 °C. In addition, electromigration (EM) is one of the major failure mechanisms of electronic interconnect under high current density (> ~105 A/cm2) stressing in microelectronics devices. In this talk, we investigated the opto-electrical properties, and electromigration reliability of a Ag-Pd-Cu alloy (APC) reflector for near UV (385 nm)-LEDs as a function of temperature and compared with those of Ag only reflector. SEM results revealed that the Ag samples were less stable than the APC samples upon annealing. The contact resistivities of the Ag and APC contacts annealed at 500 °C were measured to be 2.59 × 10– 4 and 1.85 × 10–4 Wcm2, respectively. The Ga 2p core level for the APC sample shifted towards the lower binding-energies by 0.67 eV as compared to that of the as-deposited sample. The forward I-V properties of near UV LEDs fabricated with the Ag and APC reflectors were observe to be similar each other. Notably, the UV LEDs with the APC reflector produced 9.04% higher output at 100 mA than those with the Ag reflector. To investigate the device reliability, the EM behaviour of Ag and APC films were also characterised. The APC samples exhibited better EM resistance than the Ag samples. The APC samples yielded higher activation energies of the EM failures than the Ag sample. The better EM behaviour of the APC samples will be described and discussed on the basis of XRD pole figure and electron back scatter diffraction, phi scan, and inverse pole figures (IPFs) examination results.