LIGHT EMITTING DIODE

PLANAR LED

 Simplest of the structures that are available.

 Fabricated by either liquid or vapour-phase epitaxial process
over the whole surface of a GaAs substrate.
 Involves a p type diffusion into the n type substrate in order to
create the junction.
 Forward current flow through the junction gives spontaneous
emission and the device emits light from all surfaces.
 Only a limited amount of light escapes the structure due to
total internal reflection.
PLANAR LED
DOME LED
 A hemisphere of n type GaAs is formed around a diffused p
type region.
 The diameter of the dome is chosen to maximize the amount of
internal emission reaching the surface within the critical angle of the
GaAs-air interface.
 Has a higher external power efficiency than the planar LED.
 Dome must be far larger than the active recombination area,
which gives a greater effective emission area.
DOME LED
SURFACE EMITTING LED
Surface emitting led
Surface emitting led
SURFACE EMITTING LED
 Also called Burrus or front emitter LED’s.
 Structured to obtain high radiance and efficient coupling of the emitted light into
a fiber.
 It is essentially a double heterostructure device.
 The bottom P- GaAs and top n- GaAs are included for the realization of the
low
resistance ohmic contacts.
 To avoid reabsorption of the emitted radiation in the top n-GaAs layer , a
deep well is etched to reach the top n-AlGaAs layer.
 Can be done by a selective etchant that etches GaAs but not AlGaAs.
 The well is also used to support the fiber, which is butt-coupled to the
device inorder to accept the emitted light.
 The plane of the active light-emitting region is oriented perpendicularly to the
axis of the fiber.
SURFACE EMITTING LED
 The thin SiO2 layer at the back isolates the contact layer from the gold heat sink.

 Photons are generated in the thin p-GaAs region and emission from the top surface
is ensured by the heterostructure and reflection from the back crystal face.

 Thus the forward radiance of these devices is very high.

 The fiber is properly aligned to optimize coupling of the emitted radiation.

 But, there is some loss due to the Lambertian distribution of the radiation intensity
and the coupling efficiency is typically 1-2 %.
LAMBERTIAN PATTERN
 In this pattern the source LED
LASER
is equally bright when
viewed from any direction,
but the power diminishes as
cos θ .
 Thus the power is down to
50 percent of its peak when
θ=60o, so that half power
beam width is 120o