Simulation driven development of UV LEDs and other optoelectronic devices using the nextnano software

UV LEDs are promising. While germicidal ultraviolet irradiation (wavelength range 240-280 nm) is an effective disinfectant but hazardous, far UV-C radiation (200-225 nm) is claimed to be both effective for disinfection and safe for human skin and eyes under direct exposure. However, deep UV AlGaN-based LEDs are currently too costly for widespread use as they suffer from poor efficiency and low light output power performance, especially for the far UV regime. When lowering the wavelength by increasing the Al content, the in-plane intensity of transverse-electric (TE) polarized light decreases relative to that of the transverse-magnetic (TM) polarized light and thus reduces the light extraction efficiency. We present our recent progress towards developing a self-consistent multiband k.p Schrodinger-Poisson-Current solver for optimization of the epitaxial layout. It considers the strain-induced effects on the valence band structure and on the related optical transition matrix elements.