Design and fabrication of resonant cavity enhanced light-emitting diodes using a tunnel diode contact

Summary form only given.A resonant cavity improves the emission characteristics of a light-emitting diode (LED) by reducing its spectral linewidth, increasing its emission power and directionality. The resonant cavity light-emitting diode (RCLED) is a promising low-cost light source for fiber-optic communications. Limited by the device growth and processing techniques, the mirrors of choice for most RCLEDs are still DBR of multiple pairs. The design and growth of a DBR significantly increases the cost of these devices. More importantly, some material systems do not have compatible semiconductor DBR, which makes it very difficult to fabricate RCLEDs. It is highly desirable to design mirrors independent of LED active material growth. In this paper, we report our design and fabrication of a RCLED emitting at 890 nm with its cavity consisting of only metal mirrors by use of a tunnel diode contact scheme and a simple yet reliable substrate-removal technique. By eliminating the DBR, we significantly decreased the fabrication cost of our high-speed RCLEDs.