Researchers discover LED 'Efficiency Cliff'

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have successfully fabricated InGaN blue LEDs down to 250nm in size, a critical step for next- generation high-resolution displays and optical comms. However, their study, published in Applied Physics Letters, reveals a new challenge: a sharp 'efficiency cliff' when these LEDs are scaled to submicron dimensions.

The team, led by Can Bayram, professor at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Innovative Compound semiconductoR LABoratory (ICORLAB), employed a top-down fabrication approach using electron beam lithography on QST substrates.