| The resonant cavity light-emitting diode (RCLED) is considered as an attractive light source for fiber optic communications for its economy and simplicity compared with lasers. By careful structure design, a resonant cavity light emitting diode provides more directional light emission with narrower spectrum linewidth, and launches more optical power into an optical fiber than conventional light-emitting diodes (LEDs). However, the typically reported RCLEDs adopt distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) as cavity mirrors, which significantly increases the device fabrication cost. This thesis study focuses on an alternative way---using only metal mirrors to realize resonant cavity light-emitting diodes. In this study, a tunnel diode, for the first time, was used as a contact scheme to facilitate metal mirror/contact attachment. Ag-mirrored RCLEDs were designed, a new processing technique was developed to realize thin-film RCLEDs. The final devices have half the spectrum linewidth and nearly triple the fiber-coupled power of non-cavity light emitting diodes. These performance improvements make the high-speed resonant cavity light-emitting diodes developed at Purdue University one step closer to the optical fiber communication applications. |
