New generation light emitting diodes:fundamentals and applications

Abstract

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) have made tremendous progress in last 15 years andhave reached to a point where they are reinventing and redefining artificial lighting.The efficiency and better control over light quality parameters have been the keyattributes of LEDs that makes them better than the existing lighting solutions.Nevertheless, in their own realm they suffer from decrease in efficiency at highercurrents, i.e. the “efficiency droop” phenomenon. Thus, a better understandingof the mechanisms leading to droop is of utmost importance. Moreover, the fullpotential in terms of light quality, i.e. colour rendering index (CRI) and correlatedcolour temperature (CCT) that can be offered by these devices can be furtherimproved with existing or alternative schemes and device configurations.In this thesis, a novel phosphor covered approach is investigated towards improvingthe CRI for indoor lighting applications. A monolithic di-chromatic LEDemitting at blue and cyan wavelengths is used to pump a green-red phosphor mixtureand a warm (CCT ∼ 3400 K) white light with a superior CRI of 98.6 is achieved.An alternate phosphor free solution to achieve warm white light emission is alsostudied. These monolithic di-chromatic QW devices emitting at blue and greenwavelengths under electrical pumping demonstrated tuneable emission from cool(CCT ∼ 22000 k) to warm (CCT ∼ 5500 K) white light. A maximum CRI of 67,which is the highest value demonstrated for such devices till date to the best of myknowledge, is also achieved.On the subject of efficiency of LEDs, temperature dependence of LEE andIQE of commercial InGaN/GaN based blue LED is studied in light of a step-wiseprocessing procedure based on the ABC-model to determine these quantities. Adecrease in both IQE and LEE with temperature is noted. On the other hand,efficiency decrease in the investigated AlGaInP based red LEDs under pulsed currentshows a shift in the onset of efficiency decrease towards higher current values withdecreasing pulse width with < 1% duty cycle. For sub-nanosecond pulses a linearrelation between applied peak current and peak output power is obtained. Theseobservations indicate device self-heating