Life-time estimation of high-power blue light-emitting diode chips

We have proposed a new concept of metal package by which we can estimate the lifetime of blue light-emitting diode (LED) chips with high accuracy. Components in conventional LED package which may obscure the degradation behavior of LED chip itself were removed or replaced by other materials or components. Three kinds of chips from different manufacturers were analyzed in this study using proposed metal packages. In this paper, the optical and electrical characteristics such as light-output degradation and reverse leakage current of high-power blue LED chip were investigated and analyzed. Also, the relationship between light-output degradation and electrical characteristics of LED chip was described. With aging time of 5000 h, only one kind of blue LED chip shows enough light-output degradation to estimate life-time.