Modification of internal quantum efficiency and efficiency droop in GaN-based flip-chip light-emitting diodes via the Purcell effect

The Purcell effect in GaN-based flip-chip (FC) light-emitting diode (LED) structures is investigated numerically using finite-difference time-domain simulations. Depending on the thickness of the p-GaN layer, the variation of the Purcell factor of FC LEDs is obtained to be as high as 20%, which results in the relative modification of the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) as large as 8% and 2.5% for the unmodified IQE of 0.4 and 0.8, respectively. Since the influence of the Purcell effect becomes more conspicuous as the IQE decreases, the Purcell enhancement can be advantageously used to mitigate the efficiency droop problem to some extent. When the Purcell effect is positively applied to the blue LED with the peak IQE of 0.8 and the droop ratio of 29.1%, the peak IQE and the droop ratio are found to be improved to 0.82 and 26.3%. This small but non-negligible effect on IQE is expected to be importantly adopted for industry development of high efficiency LEDs. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America