Heat dissipation analysis of bendable AlGaInP micro-LED arrays

Abstract

A strategy for fabricating bendable AlGaInP light emitting diode (LED) arrays is presented in this paper. Sample LED arrays with 8 × 8 pixels were fabricated and subjected to bending. Bending only weakly affected the light output power and the current–voltage characteristics of the arrays. LED arrays suffer from a thermal problem owing to the energy loss during the electrical-to-optical energy conversion. We have designed a three-dimensional heat conduction model for analyzing the effect of the polymer substrate, the configuration of pixels, and the micro-structure on heat dissipation in bendable LED arrays. Thermal conductivity of the polymer substrate critically affected the heat dissipation, suggesting that the substrate thickness should be in the 500–1000 μm range. A larger pixel distance yielded more distributed heat sources and more uniform temperature distribution. Micro-structured polymer substrates yielded lower temperature, especially for the fins array micro-structure. Based on enhancing the polymer’s thermal conductivity and distributing LED pixels, optimizing the substrate’s micro-structure is an effective method to improve heat dissipation in bendable LED arrays. Optimized heat dissipation could effectively reduce heat accumulation in LED arrays and alleviate an increase in the junction temperature, allowing to increase the output power of the device.