Vertical GaN based Light Emitting Diodes on Metal Alloy Substrate for Solid State Lighting Application T. Doan 1) , C. Chu 2) , C. Chen 2) , W. Liu 2) , J. Chu 2) , J. Yeh 2) , H. Chen 2) , F. Fan 2) , C. Tran 1) 1) SemiLEDs Corp., 1080 S. Milpitas Blvd. Milpitas, California 95035 USA 2) Semi-Photonics, 8F, No.13, Ke-Jung Rd., Chunan Site, Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan ABSTRACT Vertical GaN based Light Emitting Diodes on metal alloy substrate were realized and characterized for solid state lighting application. An efficiency of more than 70 lumens/watt was achieved. In addition, these LEDs exhibit many advantages over those on sapphire under extreme operation conditions for general lighting application. Keywords: LEDs, Solid State Lighting, Metal Substrate 1. INTRODUCTION Since their commercial introduction in the early 1990s 1,2 , InGaN Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have found their way into a wide variety of applications. Despite rapid progress in both Epitaxy and device processing, LEDs are still a long way from being used for general lighting purposes. Two major issues associated with the use of LEDs for general lighting application are 1) the high cost per lumen and 2) difficult thermal management as LED is a point light source; therefore, greater performance and cost improvement are necessary for full commercialization of LEDs. Until today the commercially available LED chips are either on sapphire or SiC. The high thermal resistance of sapphire or SiC will cause rapid degradation of devices due to excessive heating from active area during high current operation for general lighting application. In addition lateral conduction of current in the case of devices on sapphire also prohibits scaling device size to large ones required for general lighting application 3 . 2. RESULT AND DISCUSSION In this work, we show the performance of vertical GaN based LED on metal substrate (VLEDMS) in mass production with an efficiency good enough for general lighting. The novel LED is assembled on 80 microns metal substrate. For this particular case we present the data of LED employing copper alloy for 1000 micron size chips. The LED structure consists of a mirror, directly deposited on copper alloy, Light-Emitting Diodes: Research, Manufacturing, and Applications X, edited by Klaus P. Streubel, H. Walter Yao, E. Fred Schubert, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 6134, 61340G, (2006) 0277-786X/06/$15 · doi: 10.1117/12.673987 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 6134 61340G-1