LED PERFORMANCE

CHARACTERISTICS
Reliability
 Reliability in LED’s

• LEDs are not generally affected by the catastrophic degradation

• mechanisms which can severely affect injection lasers.

• LEDs do exhibit gradual degradation which may take the form of

a rapid degradation mode or a slow degradation mode.

• Rapid degradation in LEDs is similar to that in injection lasers, and is

due to both the growth of dislocations and precipitate-type defects
in the active region giving rise to
– dark line defects (DLDs) (dominant in GaAs-based LEDs)
– dark spot defects (DSDs) (predominant in InP-based LEDs)
Reliability in LED’s
• LEDs may be fabricated which are largely free from these defects and
are
therefore subject to a slower long-term degradation process.
• This homogeneous degradation is thought to be due to recombination
enhanced point defect generation (i.e. vacancies and interstitials), or
the migration of impurities into the active region .
• The optical output power Pe(t) may be expressed as a function of the
operating time t, and is given by

• where Pout is the output power and βr is the degradation rate.

Reliability in LED’s
• The degradation rate is characterized by the activation energy of
homogeneous degradation Ea and is a function of temperature. It is
given by:

• where β0 is a proportionality constant, K is Boltzmans constant and T is

the absolute temperature of the emitting region
• An InGaAsP surface emitter has an activation energy of 1 eV with a
constant of proportionality (β0) of 1.84 × 107 h−1. Estimate the CW
operating lifetime for the LED with a constant junction temperature
of 17°C, if it is assumed that the device is no longer useful when its
optical output power has diminished to 0.67 of its original value.
Initially, it is necessary to obtain the degradation rate βr
• A lens-coupled surface-emitting LED launches 190 μW of optical
power into a multimode step index fiber when a forward current of
25 mA is flowing through the device. Determine the overall power
conversion efficiency when the corresponding forward voltage across
the diode is 1.5 V.