Enhanced Performance of LEDs Using Periodic Tent-Like Post Patterns on A-plane Sapphire Substrates

Periodic tent-like post patterns on a-plane sapphire substrates were fabricated using a two-step etching process. They were denoted as a-plane dot pattern sapphire substrate (ADPSS). Compared with the GaN-based light-emitting diode (LED) grown on a-plane sapphire without any pattern (AFlat), the ADPSS-LED has higher output power, light extraction efficiency (LEE), and external quantum efficiency (EQE), and better crystal quality. The output power of ADPSS-LED was 9.6 mW, which was 68.4% larger than the AFlat-LED. In addition, the blue shift of ADPSS-LED was found to be less than that of AFlat-LED.