Hybrid tunnel junction contacts to III–nitride light-emitting diodes

Erin C. Young, Benjamin P. Yonkee, Feng Wu, Sang Ho Oh, Steven P. DenBaars, Shuji Nakamura, James S. Speck

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

87 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate highly doped GaN p–n tunnel junction (TJ) contacts on III–nitride heterostructures where the active region of the device and the top p-GaN layers were grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition and highly doped n-GaN was grown by NH3 molecular beam epitaxy to form the TJ. The regrowth interface in these hybrid devices was found to have a high concentration of oxygen, which likely enhanced tunneling through the diode. For optimized regrowth, the best tunnel junction device had a total differential resistivity of 1.5 × 10−4 Ω cm2, including contact resistance. As a demonstration, a blue-light-emitting diode on a ($20\bar{2}\bar{1}$) GaN substrate with a hybrid tunnel junction and an n-GaN current spreading layer was fabricated and compared with a reference sample with a transparent conducting oxide (TCO) layer. The tunnel junction LED showed a lower forward operating voltage and a higher efficiency at a low current density than the TCO LED.
Original language English (US) 022102 Applied Physics Express 9 2 https://doi.org/10.7567/apex.9.022102 Published - Jan 26 2016 Yes

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