Polarized monolithic white semipolar (20–21) InGaN light-emitting diodes grown on high quality (20–21) GaN/sapphire templates and its application to visible light communication

Abstract We demonstrate efficient, polarized and monolithic white semipolar (20–21) InGaN light-emitting diodes (LEDs) grown on high crystal quality 4-inch (20–21) GaN/sapphire template. Materials growth by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) and characterization by atom probe tomography (APT) were carried out. The fabricated regular 0.1 mm2 size LEDs show a high electrical performance with an output power of 3.9 mW at 100 mA, an emission spectrum with two peaks located at 445 nm and 565 nm, a CIE point of (0.37, 0.42) and a polarization ratio of 0.30, which make them promising candidates for backlighting in liquid crystal displays (LCDs) application. Moreover, the fabricated square phosphor-free white μLED with size ranging from 20 to 60 μm, exhibit a high 3 dB modulation bandwidth of 660 MHz in the visible light communication (VLC) system, which benefits from the shorter carrier lifetime grown on the semipolar (20–21) plane. To our best knowledge, this is the first demonstration of monolithic white semipolar μLEDs in the VLC application, which can overcome the limitation of the slow frequency response of yellow phosphors converted commercial white LEDs. These results demonstrate the huge potentials to produce high efficiency monolithic white semipolar InGaN LEDs on cost-effective large area sapphire substrates.