Review—Group III-Nitride-Based Ultraviolet Light-Emitting Diodes: Ways of Increasing External Quantum Efficiency

Abstract

There is a rapidly growing demand for highly efficient ultraviolet (UV) light sources for a wide variety of applications. In particular, state-of-the-art AlGaN deep UV light-emitting diodes (DUV LEDs) exhibit inadequately low external quantum efficiencies (EQEs). The low efficiencies are attributed to the inherent material properties of high-Al-content AlGaN including strained epitaxial layers, low carrier concentrations, and strong transverse magnetic (TM)-polarized light emission. Extensive efforts have been made to tackle these challenging issues and technological developments have been achieved and enabled the fabrication of reasonable EQE LEDs. In this review, recent advances in the growth of high-quality AlGaN epitaxial layers, transparent and reflective ohmic contacts, and light extraction for AlGaN-based UV LEDs are reviewed. Al x Ga 1-x N-based ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (UV LEDs) are of technological importance because of their applications in numerous areas such as water purification, biological analysis, sensing, epoxy curing, high-density optical storage, white light illumination, UV adhesives, 3-dimensional (3D) printer and UV-coating.1,2 These applications are made possible because of their wide bandgap energy range in the UV spectrum, which spans from 6.2 eV (AlN) to 3.4 eV (GaN), namely, from UV-A (320-400 nm), UV-B (290-320 nm) to UV-C (200-290 nm).3-7 The external quantum efficiency (EQE) of Al x Ga 1-x N-based UV LEDs decreases rapidly as the molar fraction (x) of Al increases, namely, as the wavelength decreases, as illustrated in Figure 1. 8 Thus, a great deal of effort has been made in order to improve the EQE of UV LEDs. The effort notwithstanding, however, the EQE of AlGaN-based UV LEDs is still insufficiently low. The typical EQE of UV LEDs, specifically in the UV-C spectral range (100-280 nm), is less than 5% and decreases down to 10 -6 % for 210-nm AlN-based UV LEDs. 4 These low EQEs are associated with the intrinsic material properties of Al x Ga 1-x N.1,2 Figure 2 exhibits a schematic diagram of a typical AlGaN UV LED structure grown on a sapphire substrate. The structure consists of a Si-doped n-type AlGaN, an Al x Ga 1-x N/Al y Ga 1-y N multiple-quantum well (MQW) active region, an AlGaN-based electron-blocking layer (EBL), a Mg-doped p-type AlGaN, and a Mg-doped p-type GaN. Almost every layer in the structure poses different technical issues, which limit the efficiency of UV LEDs, as shown in Figure 2. First, increasing the Al content generally results in a poor crystallinity of AlGaN epilayers, causing a poor internal quantum efficiency (IQE). Second, both n-type and ptype doping efficiencies of AlGaN are difficult to increase because the ionization energies of acceptor (Mg) and donor (Si) dopants largely increase with increasing Al content. The low doping efficiency causes several technological problems: (i) a poor electrical efficiency (EE) attributable to high-resistance contacts on resistive n-type and p-type AlGaN; (ii) current crowding causing non-uniform current in...

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