5.3 Introduction to III-V Nitrides - Applications

The successful development of a method for the production of p-type GaN has resulted in the fabrication of blue light emitting diodes and various microelectronics devices (Ref. 2). With the fabrication of efficient blue LED's it is now feasible to work on full color LED flat panel displays as well. The main industries profiting from such a display are TV and computer manufacturer. Flat panel displays could replace bulky CRT tubes and permit large light weight displays with superior resolution. This becomes especially important with the current development efforts of high resolution television. The practicability of today's laptop computers is mainly limited by their operating time on a battery charge. Tremendous efforts are made by laptop manufacturers to minimize the power consumption. Current full color displays are the main user of the precious energy, and with the introduction of efficient LED screens the battery lifetime can be extended dramatically.

The development of blue semiconductor lasers would be a large step forward for the recording industry, both entertainment as well as data storage. The shorter wavelength will immediately push up recording density by a factor of about 4 without the need of substantial redesigning of existing storage devices. This will benefit the CD industry as well as magneto-optical (MO) drives.

It is well known that seawater is transparent to UV radiation. UV devices could therefore be used for communication or detection under water, for example by submarines or torpedoes.

UV devices could also take advantage of the properties of the earth's ozone layer, which nearly completely absorbs radiation in the 240-280 nm (~4.75 eV) band. This would permit space to space communication undetectable from earth and surveillance of objects leaving the atmosphere on the dark side of the earth (Ref. 1). Like most wide band gap semiconductors, the nitrides are expected to exhibit superior radiation hardness compared to GaAs and Si, which also makes them attractive for space applications (Ref. 1).

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