“In a research note published by the journal ACS Photonics in January, the researchers reported a more elegant method for fabricating high quality UV-C LEDs. It involves depositing a film of aluminum gallium nitride on a substrate of silicon carbide instead of the more widely used sapphire substrate.
According to Zollner, using silicon carbide allows for more efficient and cost effective growth of high quality UV-C semiconductor material than does sapphire. “As a general rule of thumb, the more structurally similar (in terms of atomic crystal structure) the substrate and the film are to each other, the easier it is to achieve high material quality,” he says. It is also much less expensive…”
