Solid State Lighting

James S. Speck
Materials Department
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA
 Impact of Solid State Lighting

150 lm/Watt solid State White LED Light:

in the United States alone … :

•  Take 100+ coal-fired power stations offline!

•  Eliminate 250 million metric tons of CO2
•  Save >270 TWh/year
US Electricity Use:
22% for Lighting
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 What is a Light Emitting Diode?

•  Monocrystalline atomic arrangement determines semiconductor bandgap

–  Specifies optical properties
•  Impurity doping provides p- and n-type regions
•  At forward bias, injected electrons and holes recombine
•  Energy may be released radiatively (light) or non-radiatively (heat)
•  Fundamentally non-destructive

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 Real Atomic Scale Structure of an LED!

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 LED Fabrication

LUXEON! Rebel

•  Material systems typically III-V compound semiconductor alloys

•  Layer deposition by metal-organic-chemical-vapor-deposition
(MOCVD)
•  Similar roadmap as for Si-based integrated circuit technology

after Krames et al., CLEO Presentation, SSLEC

June 2009
Luminous Efficacy (lm/W) LED Efficiency

SiC

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Dupuis and Krames, IEEE J. Lightwave Tech. 26, 1154 (2009).
 III-V Materials Systems for SSL

•  (Al,Ga)InP system offers red (~650 nm) to yellow (~580 nm) emission
•  (In,Ga)N system offers UV-A (~ 380 nm) to green (~550 nm) emission

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 Example Approaches to Solid State Lighting

•  Multi-Primary Color Mixing

–  Color tuning option
–  Requires color control
–  Requires color mixing optics

•  Down-Conversion Materials
–  Typically inorganic phosphors
–  Disadvantage: Stoke’s shift
–  Advantage: integrated color mixing

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after Mueller-Mach et al., phys. stat. sol. (a) 202, 1727 (2005)
 Human Eye Response
Daylight (Photopic – Cones)

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More on Light

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More on White Light

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Current Light Source Efficiencies

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DOE SSL Multi-Year Program Plan: 2009-2015
 Major GaN SSL Issues:
Green Gap and Droop

Major research objectives:

Connect device results (empirical) with theory and experiment
Fundamental origin of droop and green gap
Are droop and the green gap related?

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 Wurtzite GaN - Polarization

[0001]
c-direction
[0001]

<1010>

<1120> m-direction

a-direction

Figure: Mel McLaurin

P. Waltereit et al, Nature 406, L1329 (2000).
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 Semipolar LEDs – Solution to Green Gap

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 Prospects

•  High-power LEDs
–  Beginning to enter general lighting
–  Commercial LEDs 70-80 lm/W (warm whtie)
–  Costs are ~ 75 lm/$ (LED) vs. ~ 5 lm/$ (lamp)
–  Compare to ~ 1000 lm/$ (general incand. bulb)

•  Adoption
–  Generally slow; slower due to high costs
–  Cost reduction breakthrough is key
–  Green trend / legislation will help
–  New markets have helped – LED LCD TV

•  Energy efficiency
–  SSL has the promise to reduce global electricity consumption >10%
–  $100B/yr in energy costs, and > 200 M tonnes per yr of CO2

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 Timeline for SSL

LEDs

*U.S. Dept. of Energy

Multi-Year Plan

•  Emerging ~ 70-80 lm/W warm white power LEDs (2700-4100K)

•  Expect > 150 lm/W power LED performance in the future

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