Hsien-Yu Liao has defended his MS work on "Fabrication and Characterization of Micro-Membrane GaN Light Emitting Diodes"

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Hsien-Yu Liao (Patrick) has defended his MS work on ​"Fabrication and Characterization of Micro-Membrane GaN Light Emitting Diodes"!​ The thesis committee is chaired by Prof. Boon Ooi (KAUST), including the members of Prof. Fan Ren (University of Flordia), Prof. Muhammad M. Hussain (KAUST), and Prof. Jr-Hau He (KAUST).

Abstract

Developing etching of GaN material system is the key to device fabrications. In this thesis, we report on the fabrication of high throughput lift-off of InGaN/GaN based micro-membrane light emitting diode (LED) from sapphire substrate using UV-assisted photoelectroless chemical (PEsC) etching. Unlike existing bandgap selective etching based on unconventional sacrificial layer, the current hydrofluoric acid based wet etching process enables the selective etching of undoped GaN layer already incorporated in standard commercial LED structures, thus attaining the leverage on high performance device design, and facile wet process technology. The lift-off micro-membrane LED showed 16% alleviated quantum efficiency droop under 200 mA/cm2 current injection, demonstrating the advantage of LED epitaxy exfoliation from the lattice-mismatched sapphire substrate. The origin of the performance improvement was investigated based on non-destructive characterization methods. Photoluminescence (PL) characterization showed a 7nm peak emission wavelength shift in the micro-membrane LED compared to the GaN-on-Sapphire LED. The Raman spectroscopy measurements correlate well with the PL observation that a 0.86 GPa relaxed compressivebiaxial strain was achieved after the lift-off process. The micro-membrane LED technology enables further heterogeneous integration for forming pixelated red, green, blue (RGB) display on flexible and transparent substrate. The development of discrete and membrane LEDs using nano-fiber paper as the current spreading layer was also explored for such integration.

Biography

Hsien-Yu (Patrick) joined King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Photonics Laboratory as a master student in 2013. Before joining KAUST, he completed his bachelor degree in National Taiwan University (NTU) physics department. His research focus falls in optoelectronic devices fabrication and characterization. Work on InGaN/GaN micro-membrane fabrication and characterization is reported in his master thesis. Current work moves toward the direction of the micro-membrane LED integration.