InGaN/GaN White Light-Emitting Diodes Embedded With Europium Silicate Thin Film Phosphor

This article describes the successful fabrication of europium-silicate thin film phosphor and its application to InGaN/GaN white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in order to improve the photometric properties of the LEDs, including their correlated color temperatures (CCT) and color rendering index (CRI). The europium-silicate compounds are deposited on GaN templates grown on sapphire substrates by RF-sputtering and then annealed at 1000°C in an N₂ ambient to form a thin film phosphor that produces yellow or red emissions. The thin film phosphor is then patterned with stripes to grow a GaN buffer layer by epitaxially laterally overgrown GaN (ELOG) techniques, on which LED structures are grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition. The ELOG sample shows no pits on the surface, and the full widths at half maximum (FWHMs) of its X-ray rocking curve for the (002) and (102) planes are as low as 249 and 416 arcsec, respectively. The optical spectrum from the embedded thin film phosphor is adjusted to have a maximum intensity at 560-600 nm and a FWHM as wide as 90 nm to make up for the low efficiency at these wavelengths of conventional YAG-based yellow phosphor. Finally, we observed a tristimulus coordinate (x, y) = (0.33, 0.39), CCT = 5607 K, and CRI = 77.6 from the white LEDs with thin film phosphor as compared with (x, y) = (0.30, 0.28), CCT = 8467 K, and CRI = 66.52 for the white LEDs without thin film phosphor.