Humidity Effect on the Degradation of Packaged Ultra-bright White LEDs

Many ultra-bright light-emitting diodes (LEDs), especially the white LEDs, are being actively developed for solid-state lighting and many other commercial applications. Hence, it is important to evaluate and understand the failure mechanisms that affect the performance characteristics and lifetimes of these new LEDs. This study concerns the humidity effect on the degradation of GaN-based packaged white LEDs. Under the accelerated humidity test, the LEDs showed a degradation of optical output. With the mixture statistical distribution analysis method, it is noted that the luminous flux degradation of the packaged white LEDs is dependent on more than two failure mechanisms. Two of the failure mechanisms are observed to follow the lognormal distribution. With detailed spectrum analysis and by employing the parameters extraction method, one of the two failure mechanisms that follow the lognormal distribution is observed to be caused by chip related failure due to the accumulated moisture in the encapsulation. For the other failure mechanism, phosphor degradation is noted to be the primary cause.