Improved electrical properties of micro light-emitting diode displays by ion implantation technology

Generally, the inductively coupled plasma-reactive ion etching (ICP-RIE) mesa technology was used to remove p-GaN/MQWs and expose n-GaN for electrical contact in a fabricated micro light-emitting diode (μLED). In this process, the exposed sidewalls were significantly damaged which result in small-sized μLED presenting a strong size-dependent influence. Lower emission intensity was observed in the μLED chip, which can be attributed to the effect of sidewall defect during etch processing. To reduce the non-radiative recombination, the ion implantation using an As⁺ source to substitute the ICP-RIE mesa process was introduced in this study. The ion implantation technology was used to isolate each chip to achieve the mesa process in the μLED fabrication. Finally, the As⁺ implant energy was optimized at 40 keV, which exhibited excellent current–voltage characteristics, including low forward voltage (3.2 V @1 mA) and low leakage current (10^–9 A@− 5 V) of InGaN blue μLEDs. The gradual multi-energy implantation process from 10 to 40 keV can further improve the electrical properties (3.1 V @1 mA) of μLEDs, and the leakage current was also maintained at 10^–9 A@− 5 V.