(Invited) The Application of ALD and ALE Passivated MicroLED Display

Abstract

Micro LED has been engaged to the next generation display technology and evolved for various applications from several electronic manufacturers and institutions. The less than 10×10 μm2 area of micro-LEDs is desired for the high pixel per inch (PPI) of micro display but the sidewall effect from etching process will drop the quantum efficiency. Therefore, a good passivation process is essential to be introduced into micro-LED process to overcome the efficiency droop issue. The passivation technique of atomic layer deposition (ALD) enables to improve the sidewall damages from dry etching and hence the quantum efficiency of micro-LEDs can be enhanced [1, 2]. Furthermore, the improvement can be enhanced within smaller size of micro LEDs. In particular, due to the excellent uniformity and step coverage passivation by ALD Al2O3 thin films, the interest in efficient ALD equipment has gradually increased. The atomic layer etching (ALE) is an advance etching process that promises an excellent depth control in shallow device structures. This paper provides an overview of ALD and ALE process for improving the micro-LED performance.The epitaxial structure of the micro-LED structures was grown on a c-plane sapphire substrate using metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Following the development of MOCVD, a transparent and ohmic p-contact of indium tin oxide (ITO) with a thickness of 100 nm was deposited by electron-beam evaporation as a transparent and ohmic p-contact. The ITO layer can result in efficient electrical current spreading and provide a transparent emission window for topside emitting devices. N-type GaN, p-type GaN, and the multiple quantum wells (MQWs) active region, which consists of twelve pairs of InGaN wells and a GaN barrier with an emission wavelength of around 445 nm, are the major epitaxial layers. The growth phases of micro-LED processing included mesa etching, ohmic contact metallization, sidewall passivation deposition using Al2O3 of thickness 21.3 nm and SiO2 of thickness 300 nm, and interconnects. The inductively coupled plasma (ICP) dry etching process is used for the mesa etching method, and SiO2 and Al2O3 passivation layers are deposited using PECVD and ALD techniques. Since Al2O3 and SiO2 are well-known dielectric materials for photonic applications, they were selected. Because of the field effect passivation produced by negative fixed charges, Al2O3 has emerged as a unique passivation material for commercial solar cells. The passivation layers tend to prevent surface recombination and reabsorption of emitted light near the etched surface during forward-biased activity. Following the deposition of the dielectric passivation layers, a hole was created using the ICP etching technique for the deposition of metal contacts. The electrode metal consisted of 50/300 nm of Ti/Au for p- and n- metal contacts deposited using electron-beam evaporation followed by rapid thermal annealing. The process flow of ALD passivated micro-LED is shown in Fig. 1(a).Fig. 1(b) showed the effect of the ALD-Al2O3 passivation technique on the EQE enhancement of µ-LEDs. According to the literature, the peak EQE of a small LED is considerably small due to the surface and nonradiative recombination of the mesa layer caused by plasma-assisted dry etching. ALD sidewall passivation is an important method for reducing plasma damage in LEDs. We can observe the 21.3 nm Al2O3 passivation on micro-LED in Fig.1(a). Therefore, Fig. 1 (b) presents the EQEs of 10 × 10-µm2 µ-LEDs with and without an Al2O3 passivation layer deposited using the ALD technology for reducing plasma damage. Compared with the device not subjected to ALD-Al2O3 passivation, the 10 × 10-µm2 array subjected to ALD-Al2O3 passivation exhibited an EQE enhancement of 37.5%. This result proves that ALD sidewall passivation can effectively reduce the sidewall damage caused by SRH nonradiative recombination and thus increase the EQE of small LEDs.