Study of 375 nm ultraviolet InGaN/AlGaN light-emitting diodes with heavily Si-doped GaN transition layer in growth mode, internal quantum efficiency, and device performance

High performance 375 nm ultraviolet (UV) InGaN/AlGaN light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were demonstrated with inserting a heavy Si-doped GaN transition layer by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. From transmission electron microcopy (TEM) image, the dislocation densities were significantly reduced due to the existence of the heavily Si-doping growth mode transition layer (GMTL), which results in residual stress relaxation and 3D growth. The internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of the LEDs with GMTL was measured by power-dependent photoluminescence (PL) to be 40.6% higher than ones without GMTL. The GMTL leads to the superior IQE performance of LEDs not only in decreasing carrier consumption at nonradiative recombination centers but also in partially mitigating the efficiency droop tendency. When the vertical-type LED chips (size: 1 mm × 1 mm) was driven with a 350 mA injection current, the output powers of the LEDs with and without GMTL were measured to be 286.7 and 204.2 mW, respectively. A 40.4% enhancement of light output power was achieved. Therefore, using the GMTL to reduce dislocations would be a promising prospective for InGaN/AlGaN UV-LEDs to achieve high IQE.