APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 95, 011116 2009

Advantages of blue InGaN multiple-quantum well light-emitting diodes with InGaN barriers
Yen-Kuang Kuo,1,a Jih-Yuan Chang,1 Miao-Chan Tsai,2 and Sheng-Horng Yen3
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Department of Physics, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 500, Taiwan Institute of Photonics, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 500, Taiwan 3 R&D Division, Epistar Co., Ltd., Science-based Industrial Park, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan

Received 18 April 2009; accepted 17 June 2009; published online 10 July 2009 The advantages of blue InGaN light-emitting diodes LEDs with InGaN barriers are studied. The L-I curves, carrier concentrations in the quantum wells, energy band diagrams, and internal quantum efciency are investigated. The simulation results show that the InGaN/InGaN LED has better performance over its conventional InGaN/GaN counterpart due to the enhancement of electron connement, the reduced polarization effect between the barrier and well, and the lower potential barrier height for the holes to transport in the active region. The simulation results also suggest that the efciency droop is markedly improved when the traditional GaN barriers are replaced by InGaN barriers. 2009 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.3176406 The quantum efciency QE of conventional InGaN/ GaN multiquantum well MQW light-emitting diodes LEDs reaches its peak at low current density and monotonically decreases with further increasing drive current.14 This phenomenon, commonly referred to as efciency droop, is a critical restriction for the usage of LEDs in high power applications. Many suggestions to its mechanism have been reported, such as the Auger recombination,5 electron leakage,2,3,6,7 carrier injection efciency,68 polarization eld,2,3 and lling of localized states.9 Nevertheless, the physical origin of efciency droop remains debatable and, hence, an overall solution is still a lack. For the exploration of efciency droop in blue InGaN LEDs, the carrier injection and distribution in the active region may be a key issue. It has been reported that only the last QW next to the p-type region contributes to radiative recombination in the InGaN MQW LEDs.8,10 This is because that holes in GaN based materials have a relatively high effective mass and therefore a very low mobility. Moreover, the electron blocking layer EBL is considered to act as a potential barrier also for holes. Under this circumstance, it is difcult for holes to inject into the active region and transport in the active region. Thus, a large amount of holes accumulate in the last QW next to the p-type region. As for the electrons, due to the opposite characters to holes and the insufcient blocking efciency of EBL under polarization elds, they can transport easily in the active region and even overow across the EBL to the p-type region. As a result, nonuniform distribution of carriers is expected, which explains why not every QW contributes to radiative recombination. In this paper, the optical and electrical properties of conventional InGaN/GaN MQW LEDs and new designed InGaN/InGaN MQW LEDs are investigated numerically with the APSYS simulation program, which was developed by the Crosslight Software Inc.11 The original blue InGaN LED used as a reference was grown on a c-plane sapphire substrate, followed by a 50-nm-thick undoped GaN layer, and a
a

4.5- m-thick n-GaN layer n-doping= 5 1018 cm3 . The active region consisted of ve 2-nm-thick In0.21Ga0.79N QWs, separated by six 15-nm-thick GaN barriers. On top of the active region was a 20-nm-thick p-Al0.15Ga0.85N EBL and a 0.5- m-thick p-GaN cap layer p-doping= 1.2 1018 cm3 . The device geometry was designed with a rectangular shape of 300 300 m2. The internal absorption within the LED device is assumed to be 500 m1 and the operating temperature is assumed to be 300 K. To simplify the simulation, the light extraction efciency is assumed to be 0.78. Other material parameters of the semiconductors used in the simulation can be found in Ref. 12. The surface charges at the interfaces are calculated by the methods developed by Fiorentini et al.13 The experimental and simulated light-current-voltage L-I-V performance curves of the original InGaN/GaN structure are plotted in Fig. 1 a , which shows good agreement between the experimental data and our simulations. The distribution of carrier concentrations near the active region of the original InGaN/GaN structure at an injection current of 150 mA is shown in Fig. 1 b . It indicates that both electrons and holes distributions are quite nonuniform among QWs; namely, most carriers concentrate on the last QW next to the p-type region. There also exists a severe electron leakage in this LED structure.

Electronic mail: ykuo@cc.ncue.edu.tw. Tel.: 886-4/721-1153.

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FIG. 1. Color online a Experimental and simulated L-I-V performance curves of original InGaN/GaN structure. b Distribution of carrier concentrations of original InGaN/GaN structure at 150 mA gray regions represent the location of QWs . 2009 American Institute of Physics

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FIG. 2. Color online a Energy band diagram of original InGaN/GaN structure at 150 mA. b Enlarged drawing of the conduction band near EBL. c Enlarged drawing near last QW.

FIG. 3. Color online a Energy band diagram of proposed InGaN LED structure with In0.1Ga0.9N barriers at 150 mA. b Enlarged drawing of the conduction band near EBL. c Enlarged drawing near last QW.

For the above phenomenon, Park and co-workers2,3 reported that the polarization eld induced sloped triangular barriers will hinder the transportation of electrons and cause the conduction band on the n-side to be higher than that on the p-side. This in turn results in a large electron leakage current. In a recent paper, Xu et al.14 proposed to use the polarization-matched InGaN/InGaN MQW structure to reduce the potential difference of conduction band between the n-side and p-side, and to improve the device performance. In their article, however, the experimental data do not show much decrease of forward voltage under the same injection current that can diminish the above potential difference for the InGaN/InGaN MQW LEDs. Therefore, there might exist other mechanisms which are responsible for the improvement of LED performance. Figure 2 shows the energy band diagram of the original InGaN/GaN structure and its local enlargements at 150 mA. In these plots, a severe situation of bend bending, i.e., sloped triangular barriers and wells, is observed. The sloped triangular barriers cause the conduction band edge of barriers to be higher than the conduction band of EBL, as shown in Fig. 2 b . Note that the conduction band of EBL is also deformed by polarization elds. Thus, insufcient electron blocking efciency and thereby serious electron current leakage can be expected in this structure.7 Figure 2 c shows the enlarged band diagram of the last QW and the electron and hole wave functions. Due to the quantum conned Stark effect QCSE , the electron and hole wave functions separate partially, which results in poor overlap between the two wave functions, as well as the reduction of radiative recombination rate and internal QE IQE . In order to improve the above shortcomings, an InGaN/ InGaN MQW structure, with an indium composition of 10% in the InGaN barriers, is proposed. As shown in Figs. 3 a and 3 b , the effective barrier height between the last barrier and EBL is increased dramatically due to the lower conduction band energy of InGaN barrier. The electron blocking efciency of EBL is inuenced by the thickness and alumi-

num composition; the thicker EBL and the higher aluminum composition in AlGaN layer, the better electron connement. However, on the other hand, this also increases the difculty for holes to transport in valence band. Therefore, replacing the traditional GaN barrier with a lower band gap InGaN barrier is benecial for enhancing the electron connement without the price of blocking the holes. Moreover, the InGaN barriers may help the holes to transport in the QW region more easily because of the lower barrier height in valence band, which is also benecial for reducing the electron current leakage. Besides, because of the better match of lattice constants between the InGaN barrier and InGaN well, the band bending situation is less severe, as shown in Fig. 3 c , which in turn results in less QCSE and better light emission efciency. Figure 4 shows the carrier concentrations of InGaN/ InGaN structure near the active region at 150 mA. It indicates that both electron and hole distributions in the QWs are more uniform than those of the InGaN/GaN structure. Note also that the electron leakage current is minimal, indicating the effectiveness of EBL in the InGaN/InGaN structure. The two peaks in the curve of electron concentration in the lefthand side and right-hand side of QW region represent the massive electrons accumulating in the rst and last barriers

FIG. 4. Color online Carrier concentrations of InGaN/InGaN structure near active region at 150 mA.

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enhanced, the electron current leakage is markedly reduced, and the efciency droop becomes less severe due to the relatively small polarization effect between the barriers and wells, and the lower potential barrier height in the active region for holes.
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FIG. 5. Color online a IQE and b light output power as a function of current for the two LED structures under study.

which have sloped triangular barriers, as indicated in Fig. 3, due to the large amount of polarization charges at GaN InGaN and InGaNAlGaN interfaces. Because of the advantages in carrier injection and electron blocking, the performance of the InGaN/InGaN LED is expected to be superior to the conventional InGaN/GaN LED. Figure 5 shows the IQE and light output power as a function of current for the two LED structures under study, which indicates that the InGaN/InGaN LED has better lighting efciency, especially at high current. It is noteworthy that there is almost no efciency droop for the InGaN/InGaN LED. Note that the performance improvement of InGaN/ InGaN LED obtained in this study is much better than that observed in the experimental results reported by Xu et al.,10 which might result from the material quality degradation caused by increased indium incorporation into the barriers. In summary, when the GaN barriers are replaced by the InGaN barriers in blue InGaN LEDs, the carriers injection is

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