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For the case of the white LED (phosphor converted), the temperature affects phosphor in addition to chip and package. The heat can cause the decrease of the phosphor performance as well as the irreversible damage to the phosphor. In this study, the effect of phosphor thermal configuration on the degradation rate has been investigated experimentally and verified by the theoretical simulations. Two different configurations have been tested. One is die-contact phosphor layer and the other is remote case. The experimental result shows that the LEDs of the die-contact phosphor layers exhibit lower degradation rate than those of the remote phosphor layers. The thermal simulation considering the heat generation from the phosphor (energy converting loss) shows similar results. The temperature of remote phosphor layer is higher than the die-contact case. High temperature causes rapid degradation of phosphor. As the power consumption of LEDs increases, the heat generation from the phosphor becomes no more negligible. For the higher performance and longer lifetime, we have to consider phosphor layer as the heat generator and design the layer with sufficient thermal paths. (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

We demostrate the efficient p-type reflector for high performance vertical InGaN/GaN light emitting diodes (LEDs) with 1 × 1mm2 chip size. The reflector consists of Indium-Tin-Oxide (ITO) and Ag-Pd-Cu (APC) alloy. The ITO was inserted between p-GaN layer and APC alloy using RF magnetron sputtering to prevent inter-diffusion of APC into GaN layer. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) result shows that ITO plays an impotant role as a diffusion barrier to APC alloy. In addition, the contact resistivity of ITO to p-GaN layer was measured to be 1.32 × 10-3 Ωcm2 at annealing temperature of 600 °C for 1 minute. APC alloy was adpoted to acheive a higher reflectance for improvement of a light extraction efficiency. The APC alloy reflector appeared to have a higher reflectivity compared to conventional Ni/Ag film reflector. The verical LEDs with ITO/APC alloy reflectors showed the light-output power of 295 mW at an injection current of 350 mA, which is 15% higher than that with Ni/Ag reflectors. The output power enhancement is attributed to the increase of light extraction efficiency due to high reflectivity of APC alloy (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)