Typical light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) have a form factor >(300 × 300) µm². Such LEDs are commercially mature in illumination and ultralarge displays. However, recent LED research includes shrinking individual LED sizes from side lengths >300 µm to values <100 µm, leading to devices called micro‐LEDs. Their advent creates a number of exciting new application spaces. Here, a review of the principles and applications of micro‐LED technology is presented. In particular, the implications of reduced LED size in necessitating mitigation strategies for nonradiative device edge damage as well as the potential for higher drive current densities are discussed. The opportunities to integrate micro‐LEDs with electronics, and into large‐scale arrays, allow pixel addressable scalable integrated displays, while the small micro‐LED size is ideal for high‐speed modulation for visible light communication, and for integration into biological systems as part of optogenetic therapies.

We investigated the optical and electrical properties of red AlGaInP light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as functions of chip size, p-cladding layer thickness, and the number of multi-quantum wells (MQWs). External quantum efficiency (EQE) decreased with decreasing chip size. The ideality factor gradually increased from 1.47 to 1.95 as the chip size decreased from 350 μm to 15 μm. This indicates that the smaller LEDs experienced larger carrier loss due to Shockley-Read-Hall nonradiative recombination at sidewall defects. S parameter, defined as ∂lnL/∂lnI, increased with decreasing chip size. Simulations and experimental results showed that smaller LEDs with 5 pairs of MQWs had over 30% higher IQE at 5 A/cm² than the LED with 20 pairs of MQWs. These results show that the optimization of the number of QWs is needed to obtain maximum EQE of micro-LEDs.

We investigated the effect of atomic layer deposition (ALD) Al ₂ O ₃ (50 nm)/plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) SiO ₂ (250 nm) and PECVD SiO ₂ (300 nm) passivation layers on the leakage current and efficiency of InGaN-based micro-LEDs with different sizes. Regardless of passivation layers, the leakage current increased with decreasing LED size and increasing reverse bias. Emission microscopy examination showed that with increasing reverse bias, the number of defect-related emission spots and their intensities increased. For the micro-LEDs <50 μ m, the emission spots were mainly located at the sidewall regions. Above −10 V, the single PECVD SiO ₂ passivation layer gave higher leakage current than the double ALD-Al ₂ O ₃ /PECVD-SiO ₂ layer. The micro-LEDs with the single passivation layer gave the ideality factors of about 2.0, while that with the double layer exhibited values smaller than 2.0. The micro-LEDs with the double passivation layer exhibited external quantum efficiency peaks at lower current density compared to those with the single layer. It was shown that smaller micro-LEDs were more sensitively dependent on the types of the passivation layers. These results exhibit that the ALD-Al ₂ O ₃ /PECVD-SiO ₂ passivation layer is more effective in suppressing the sidewall damage-induced current than the PECVD-SiO ₂ layer.

Human behavior (e.g., the response to any incoming information) has very complex forms and is based on the response to consecutive external stimuli entering varied sensory receptors. Sensory adaptation is an elementary form of the sensory nervous system known to filter out irrelevant information for efficient information transfer from consecutive stimuli. As bioinspired neuromorphic electronic system is developed, the functionality of organs shall be emulated at a higher level than the cell. Because it is important for electronic devices to possess sensory adaptation in spiking neural networks, the authors demonstrate a dynamic, real‐time, photoadaptation process to optical irradiation when repeated light stimuli are presented to the artificial photoreceptor. The filtered electrical signal generated by the light and the adapting signal produces a specific range of postsynaptic states through the neurotransistor, demonstrating changes in the response according to the environment, as normally perceived by the human brain. This successfully demonstrates plausible biological sensory adaptation. Further, the ability of this circuit design to accommodate changes in the intensity of bright or dark light by adjusting the sensitivity of the artificial photoreceptor is demonstrated. Thus, the proposed artificial photoreceptor circuits have the potential to advance neuromorphic device technology by providing sensory adaptation capabilities.

The electrical characteristics of metallization contacts to a thin film N-polar n-type GaN layer fabricated by a laser lift-off process combined with a dry etching are investigated. It is shown that for Pt Schottky contacts, the Schottky barrier height of the N-polar GaN is 1.27eV, which is larger than that (1.23eV) of reference Ga-polar GaN. Ti∕Al Ohmic contacts to the N-polar GaN experience thermal degradation even at 400°C. Such annealing-induced degradation is explained in terms of the presence of the complex surface states of the N-polar GaN, which consists of impurities and process-induced donorlike and acceptorlike defects.