Improvement of Light Extraction in Deep Ultraviolet GaN Light Emitting Diodes with Mesh P-Contacts

One of the main reasons that the emission efficiency of GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) decreases significantly as the emission wavelength shorter than 300 nm is the low light extraction efficiency (LEE). Especially in deep ultra-violet (DUV) LEDs, light propagating outside the escape cone and being reflected back to the semiconductor or substrate layer is absorbed not only by active layers but also by p-type layers with narrower bandgaps and electrodes that are neither transparent nor reflective of the DUV wavelength. In this report, we propose a DUV LED structure with mesh p-GaN/indium-tin-oxide (ITO) contacts and a Ti/Al/Ni/Au layer as a reflective layer to improve LEE. The mesh p-GaN/ITO DUV LED showed an output power of 12% higher than that from the conventional DUV LED due to the lower light absorption at 280 nm.