Vertical‐type InGaN/GaN light emitting diodes with high efficiency reflector ITO/APC alloy on p‐GaN

We demostrate the efficient p-type reflector for high performance vertical InGaN/GaN light emitting diodes (LEDs) with 1 × 1mm2 chip size. The reflector consists of Indium-Tin-Oxide (ITO) and Ag-Pd-Cu (APC) alloy. The ITO was inserted between p-GaN layer and APC alloy using RF magnetron sputtering to prevent inter-diffusion of APC into GaN layer. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) result shows that ITO plays an impotant role as a diffusion barrier to APC alloy. In addition, the contact resistivity of ITO to p-GaN layer was measured to be 1.32 × 10-3 Ωcm2 at annealing temperature of 600 °C for 1 minute. APC alloy was adpoted to acheive a higher reflectance for improvement of a light extraction efficiency. The APC alloy reflector appeared to have a higher reflectivity compared to conventional Ni/Ag film reflector. The verical LEDs with ITO/APC alloy reflectors showed the light-output power of 295 mW at an injection current of 350 mA, which is 15% higher than that with Ni/Ag reflectors. The output power enhancement is attributed to the increase of light extraction efficiency due to high reflectivity of APC alloy (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)