First Demonstration of Semipolar Deep Ultraviolet Light Emitting Diode on m-Plane Sapphire with AlGaN Multiple Quantum Wells

We report on the first demonstration of a semipolar AlGaN based deep ultraviolet (UV) light emitting diode (LED), with a peak emission wavelength of 307 nm. The LED structure was grown on an m-plane sapphire substrate using metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). A combination of pulsed MOCVD (PMOCVD) grown AlN and a short period AlN/AlGaN superlattice structure was found to be instrumental in achieving singular semipolar structural phase of (1122) with a defect density low enough to fabricate the light emitting device. The on-wafer optical output power of the fabricated LED was ~20 µW at a dc pump current of 20 mA.