Thermal properties of microscale inorganic light-emitting diodes in a pulsed operation

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in a pulsed operation offer combined characteristics in efficiency, thermal management, and communication, which make them attractive for many applications such as backlight unit, optical communication, and optogenetics. In this paper, an analytic model, validated by three dimensional finite element analysis and experiments, is developed to study the thermal properties of micro-scale inorganic LEDs (μ-ILED) in a pulsed operation. A simple scaling law for the μ-ILED temperature after saturation is established in terms of the material and geometrical parameters of μ-ILED systems, peak power, and duty cycle. It shows that the normalized maximum temperature increase only depends on two non-dimensional parameters: normalized μ-ILED area and duty cycle. This study provides design guidelines for minimizing adverse thermal effects of μ-ILEDs.