Aging behavior, reliability and failure physics of GaN-based optoelectronic components

This paper critically reviews the most relevant failure modes and mechanisms of InGaN LEDs for lighting application. At chip level, both the epitaxial heterostructure and the ohmic contacts may be affected. This may result in: (i) the formation of defects within the active region, resulting in the increase of non-radiative recombination and leakage current, (ii) the reduction of the injection efficiency consequent to increased trap-assisted tunneling, (iii) the degradation of contact resistance with increase of forward voltage. Package-related failures - not described in this paper - include (iv) thermally-activated degradation processes, affecting the yellow phosphors, the plastic package or the encapsulating materials and (v) darkening of the Ag package reflective coating, the latter due to chemical reaction with contaminants as Cl or S. In order to enucleate and study the different physical failure mechanisms governing device degradation, single quantum well (SQW) blue LEDs, InGaN laser structures and commercially-available white LEDs to high temperature and/or high current density have been submitted to accelerated testing at high temperature and high current density.