Electrically Injected Hybrid III-Nitride/Organic White LEDs with Non-Radiative Energy

There is an increasing demand on developing solid-state lighting for simultaneous general illumination and visible light wireless communication (i.e., so-called Li-Fi). Current solid-state lighting sources remains founded on the well-known “blue LED + yellow phosphor” approach. This approach has a number of drawbacks, such as the self-absorption of the phosphor, limiting color-conversion efficiency, the issues on quenching and stability of phosphors, etc. More importantly, the white LED has a fundamental limit for being utilized for Li-Fi due to the very slow response time of phosphors, typically on the order of microseconds, restricting the bandwidth to below 1 MHz for Li-Fi applications. Organic light-emitting polymers (OLEPs) exhibit a number of advantages, such as high luminescence efficiencies, solubility, low cost manufacturing, flexibility, in particular much faster response time in comparison to existing phosphors which is crucially important for Li-Fi applications. OLEPs however suffer from a number of fundamental problems, in particular poor electrical properties. A hybrid organic/inorganic III-nitride white LED therefore combines the complimentary advantages of the two major semiconductor groups.