Enhancing optical output power efficiency in nitride‐based green micro light‐emitting diodes by sidewall ion implantation

Abstract Though micro‐LED (light‐emitting diode) displays are considered the emerging display technology, the micron‐scale LED chip size encounters severe efficiency degradation that may impact the power budget of the displays. This work proposes an ion implantation method to deliberately create a high‐resistivity sidewall in the InGaN/GaN green LED. Our study demonstrates that ion implantation suppresses reverse leakage current due to the mitigation of sidewall defects. For an LED mesa size of 10 × 10 μm 2 , optical output power density is improved by 36.2% compared to the device without implantation. Compared to a larger 100 × 100 μm 2 device without implantation, we achieve only 21.3% degradation of output power density under 10 A/cm 2 injection for a 10 × 10 μm 2 LED with implantation. In addition, the ion implantation method can lower the wavelength shift by reducing light emission from the region near the sidewall (where the amount of Indium [In] clustering differs from the mesa region). The results show promise in addressing the efficiency challenges of micro‐LED displays by selective ion implantation.