LED Efficiency
The luminous efficiency of COB LEDs is inherently lower than that of mid-power LEDs which have highly reflective cavities to facilitate efficient light extraction. The internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of InGaN LEDs largely depends on the wafer material. The large mismatch (13% ) between the crystal lattice structure of sapphire and that of InGaN creates a high density of threading dislocations. Recombination of electronic carriers (electrons and holes) that occurs at such sites are primarily nonradiative. SiC substrates have a substantially low GaN mism3 ). As such, the probability of photon generation in GaN-on-SiC LEDs is intrinsically higher than that in GaN-on-Sapphire LEDs. Nevertheless, growing GaN or InGaN on foreign substrates inevitably yields epitaxial defects and dislocations which are all compromising the IQE. LEDs fabricated on homoepitaxially grown GaN substrates are a superior approach to improving internal quantum efficiency. GaN-on-GaN LEDs have no lattice m ismatch and CTE mismatch between the substrate and the n-type GaN layer, and therefore induce no non-radiative recombinations due to threading dislocations.
The package-level efficiency loss of LEDs occurs at the phosphor layer. Wide emission linewidths of the red and green phosphor bands cause the conversion of a part of the shorter wavelengths to longer wavelengths to take place at a poor spectral efficiency. Typically, about –25% of the blue light absorbed by the wide band phosphor is converted to Stokes heat. The solution is to formulate phosphors with a narrow FWHM (full width half maximum) for the red and green bands or to use quantum dots (QDs) as narrow band down-converters. Light scattering and total internal reflection (TIR) are two other major contributors to package inefficiency in the powder-in-polymer approach. Maintaining a close refractive index match between the polymer matrix and phosphor particles and will reduce the scatter TIR related light loss. An anti-reflection coating (ARC) may be applied to the encapsulant to further mitigate the total internal reflection. The remote phosphor concept is developed to produce Significant gains in package efficiencies while providing a spectacularly optimized output from a uniform, pixilation-free LES.
