Innovative advances in LED technology

An overview of the rapid progress in the developments of the inorganic light emitting diode (LED) technology is presented. Innovative structures and designs of the device have led to dramatic improvements of the performance in LED technology, groundbreaking performance records are being reported constantly. This article summaries the recent progress of the high brightness LEDs, and describes the LED structures from the basic pn homojunction, to heterojunction, and eventually the use of nano-scale low-dimensional structures in the device fabrication. Some of the novel structures and designs of the most recent developed high brightness LEDs, as well as the conventional and innovative ways of producing white LEDs are briefly discussed.