Development of a mid-infrared interband cascade LED array

In our talk we will report on our progress toward the development of a mid-infrared interband cascade LED array. Our goal is to develop a 256 × 256 array of vertical LED emitters operating at 3.5 microns with each pixel emitting up to approximately 1mW of mid-infrared optical power. The first part of our development plan was to determine the best interband cascade LED structure for efficient generation of light. To this end we first investigated the tradeoff between operating current and voltage that is obtained when the number of cascades within the LED is varied. More cascades leads to a higher LED power versus current slope efficiency; however, this increase in slope efficiency is obtained at the cost of higher operating voltage and dissipated power. We will present the LED performance of interband cascade structures containing 18, 12, 6 and 3 cascades. We will exhibit mid-infrared output power performance versus the number of cascades, input power, the diameter of the LED mesas, and temperature. We will also present the LED output divergence properties. Our results to date indicate a significant drop in the efficiency of the emitted power for LED diameters near 50 microns and a nearly Lambertian power distribution. Our approach toward mitigating these issues will be to fabricate LED structures employing a surface passivation step to inhibit surface recombination on the LED mesa walls and to deep etch the mesa profile to create an index-guided output distribution. We intend to present these new results in our talk.