Ag–Pd–Cu alloy reflector to improve the opto-electrical performance and electromigration resistance of near ultraviolet GaN-based light-emitting diode

We investigated the opto-electrical and electromigration properties of near ultraviolet light emitting diodes (UV-LEDs) fabricated with Ag–Pd–Cu (APC) and Ag only reflectors. It was shown that unlike Ag only sample, the APC sample revealed a smooth surface with hillocks when annealed at 600 °C. The 600 °C-annealed APC sample gave a reflectance of 84.2% at 400 nm, whereas the Ag sample had 69.0%. Both the samples exhibited ohmic behavior when annealed. The specific contact resistivity of the Ag and APC contacts annealed at 500 °C were estimated to be 2.59 × 10⁻⁴ and 1.85 × 10⁻⁴ Ωcm², respectively. The X-ray photoemission spectroscopy Ga 2p core level results showed that for the annealed APC sample, the Ga 2p core level was shifted towards the lower binding-energies by 0.67 eV as compared to that of the as-deposited sample. Both UV-LEDs with the 500 °C-annealed Ag and APC reflectors gave the same forward voltage of 3.23 V at 20 mA. The UV-LED with the annealed APC reflector yielded 9.07% higher output at 100 mA than that with the annealed Ag reflector. The APC sample exhibited a longer median-time-to-failure (MTF) by a factor of 1.4 than the Ag sample. The activation energy for the electromigration of these samples was measured to be 0.58–0.7 eV. Electron back scatter diffraction (EBSD) and inverse pole figure (IPF) images revealed that the Ag sample was more <111>-textured than the APC sample. Based on the scanning electron microscopy, EBSD and IPF results, the better thermal and electromigration properties of the APC sample are described and discussed.