White light-emitting diodes based on nonpolar and semipolar gallium nitride orientations

Gallium nitride has become one of the key components when fabricating white light-emitting diodes. Its use as the blue source in conjunction with a wavelength converter such as the yellow emitting phosphor YAG:Ce 3+ is a technology that is commercially available and usable for solid state lighting applications. Currently available white phosphor-based LEDs (pcLEDs) use the basal plane of wurtzite GaN as their source. Although research over the past couple decades has developed this technology into devices with good photometric performance and high reliability, the introduction of nonbasal plane wurtzite GaN orientations have benefits over basal plane GaN that can be incorporated into the white LED.;The focus of this research deals with exploring white illumination on nonpolar and semipolar planes of GaN. Light extraction techniques will be described that allowed for high output powers and efficiencies on the c-plane as well as the (1100), (10 11), and (1122) planes of GaN. With higher performing devices, white pcLEDs were fabricated on c-plane, m-plane, and the (1011) semipolar plane.;The novelty in the present research is producing white LEDs with nonbasal plane diodes which exhibit optical polarization anisotropy. This feature, absent on the basal plane, allows for tuning photometric quantities both electrically and optically. This is demonstrated on pcLEDs as well as dichromatic LEDs comprised solely of InGaN diodes. As a consequence of these measurements, an apparent optical polarization was seen to be occurring in the luminescence of the YAG:Ce3+ when the system absorbed linearly polarized light.;Polarized emission in YAG:Ce3+ was explored by obtaining single crystals of YAG:Ce3+ with different planar orientations. The experiments led to the conclusion that crystal orientation plays no part in the optical polarization. It is suggested that the cause is a result of electric dipole transitions given by various selection rules between the Ce 3+ ion's 4f and 5d orbitals. It was also possible to obtain white illumination at several current values using the single crystal and a GaN source. Features of the photoluminescence show the allowed quantum transitions of YAG:Ce3+ prominently.