Monolithic integration of deep ultraviolet and visible light-emitting diodes for radiative sterilization application

The demand for effective sterilization methods, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, has sparked interest in the use of deep ultraviolet (DUV) radiation for disinfection. The high risk of skin/eye exposure to the high-energy DUV radiation requires the integration of DUV and visible (VIS) LED chips to sterilize and indicate its operation simultaneously in the portable sterilization devices. However, conventional double-chip integration suffers from high power consumption and fabrication complexity. This study sets out to explore the monolithic integration of DUV and VIS LEDs for the radiative sterilization application. This is accomplished by cascading AlGaN/AlGaN/AlGaN multiple quantum wells (QWs) and GaN/InGaN/GaN QWs through the compositional grading AlGaN cascade region. The inevitable overflown electrons from DUV QWs are deliberately introduced into the VIS QWs, allowing for the electron–hole recombination and the simultaneous emission of VIS light. Both experiment and simulation results confirm the feasibility of the proposed dual-wavelength LED integration. The proposed DUV&VIS LED shows an external quantum efficiency and wall-plug efficiency of 2.03% and 1.54% at 40 mA, respectively. This study establishes a quantitative framework for the monolithic integration of DUV and VIS LEDs for radiative sterilization, which has the potential to replace the current technique of using discrete DUV and VIS double-chip configurations.