RESUMEN
Gallium nitride (GaN) doped with germanium at a level of 1020 cm-3 is proposed as a viable material for cladding layers in blue- and green-emitting laser diodes. Spectral reflectometry and ellipsometry are used to provide evidence of a reduced index of refraction in such layers. The refractive-index contrast to undoped GaN is about 0.990, which is comparable to undoped aluminium gallium nitride (AlGaN) with an aluminium composition of 6%. Germanium-doped GaN layers are lattice-matched to native GaN substrates; therefore, they introduce no strain, cracks, and wafer bowing. Their use, in place of strained AlGaN layers, will enable significant improvements to the production process yield.
RESUMEN
We have fabricated tunnel-junction InGaN micro-LEDs using plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy technology, with top-down processing on GaN substrates. Devices have diameters between 5 µm and 100 µm. All of the devices emit light at 450 nm at a driving current density of about 10Acm-2. We demonstrate that within micro-LEDs ranging in size from 100 µm down to 5 µm, the properties of these devices, both electrical and optical, are fully scalable. That means we can reproduce all electro-optical characteristics using a single set of parameters. Most notably, we do not observe any enhancement of non-radiative recombination for the smallest devices. We assign this result to a modification of the fabrication process, i.e., replacement of deep dry etching by a tunnel junction for the current confinement. These devices show excellent thermal stability of their light emission characteristics, enabling operation at current densities up to 1kAcm-2.
RESUMEN
Visible light communications using a Gallium-nitride (GaN) laser diode is reported. Devices, which are cased in TO packages, show modulation bandwidths of up to 1.4 GHz. We demonstrate error-free data transmission, defined as transmission of 1×10(-9) bits without any errors, at 2.5 Gbit/s with a sensitivity of 11.5 dBm.