Flexible Light-Emitting Diodes Based on Vertical Nitride Nanowires

International audienceWe demonstrate large area fully flexible blue LEDs based on core/shell InGaN/GaN nanowires grown by MOCVD. The fabrication relies on polymer encapsulation, nanowire lift-off and contacting using silver nanowire transparent electrodes. The LEDs exhibit rectifying behavior with a light-up voltage around 3 V. The devices show no electro-luminescence degradation neither under multiple bending down to 3 mm curvature radius nor in time for more than one month storage in ambient conditions without any protecting encapsulation. Fully transparent flexible LEDs with high optical transmittance are also fabricated. Finally, a two-color flexible LED emitting in the green and blue spectral ranges is demonstrated combining two layers of InGaN/GaN nanowires with different In contents. F lexible light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are today a topic of intense research, motivated by their numerous economically relevant applications (e.g., rollable displays, wearable intelligent electronics, lightning, and so forth). Presently, flexible devices mainly use organic materials integrated on lightweight and flexible plastic substrates. Thanks to the flexibility, relative ease of processing, compatibility with various flexible substrates, and their low cost, organic LEDs (OLEDs) are today the key technology for flexible displays. In the past decades, the OLED performance has been tremendously improved. 1−4 However, they still face the issue of a poor time stability caused by the degradation of the electrical conductivity of the organic layers and of the interface degradation in the active region. 5−7 Especially, OLEDs present limitations in the short wavelength range, which has a detrimental influence on the color balance of the displays. Indeed, blue OLEDs suffer from a rather low luminance (around 10