Tunnel-injected ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

We report on the design, demonstration and current status of tunnel-injected ultra-violet light emitting diodes (UV LEDs). III-Nitride ultraviolet light emitting diodes (UV LEDs) are promising in various applications including sterilization, water purification and medical sensing. However, both the light extraction efficiency and electrical efficiency face fundamental challenges for the conventional UV LED structures. This stems from the poor p-type conductivity and high p-type contact resistance. Hole injection using interband tunneling provides an elegant solution to the fundamental issues of UV LEDs, and can resolve both the hole injection and light extraction issues that have been the primary problems for UV LEDs. In this talk, we will discuss in detail the heterostructure design and demonstration through polarization engineering to realize efficient interband tunneling in ultra-wide band gap AlGaN material. We will then outline some of the growth and fabrication challenges, and discuss our approaches to overcome these. Finally, we will present our results on tunnel-injected UV LEDs that have enabled us to achieve efficient UV light emission in the UVA and UVB wavelength ranges with on-wafer efficiencies comparable to state-of-the-art values [1,2,3].