Effect of Doping and Impurities on the Efficiency of III-Nitride Light Emitting Diodes

The doping of GaN based light emitting diodes (LEDs) is critical for achieving a high internal quantum efficiency. The high acceptor activation energy in GaN makes the acceptor doping a challenging task. Moreover, impurities might act as unintentional doping affecting the carrier injection. We analyze doping and impurity effects in III-nitride LEDs by means of physics based simulation. In the view of the high acceptor activation energy an enhanced impurity activation model has been devised integrating the effect of proximate doping sites and the Poole-Frenkel effect. We show by the simulation of a multi quantum well LED how the doping and shallow impurities affect the efficiency.