Study on the optical performance of thin-film light-emitting diodes using fractal micro-roughness surface model

Abstract

Although LEDs have been widely studied using optical simulations, there is no optical model considering the effect of micro-roughness surface (MRS) on the optical performance for packaged LEDs. In this work, we employ the finite-difference time-domain method and the direction-sensitive bidirectional scattering distribution function to characterize the optical properties of the MRS upon the n-GaN layer. The MRS is generated by the Weierstrass–Mandelbrot fractal function. Furthermore, thin-film LEDs (TFLEDs), blue TFLED devices, and white TFLED devices considering the MRS are investigated using the ray-tracing (RT) method. The results show that the MRS has different optical properties when the light propagates out and in the n-GaN layer. In turn, the difference in the scattering ability of various MRS causes a significant effect on the optical performance of packaged TFLEDs, including radiant efficacy, luminous efficacy, intensity pattern and spectrum, as well as the correlated color temperature.