ASU Bisgrove Scholar illuminates the future of LED lighting

The electrical engineering professor at Arizona State University proposed that by developing smart LEDs, the devices could heal wounds and even replace existing Wi-Fi technology with light-based “Li-Fi” wireless communication capable of 10,000 times higher capacity bandwidth. In 2015, this was a risky proposal involving a new and relatively untested area of research in photonics and LEDs. Luckily for Zhao, his first proposal as an ASU faculty member was accepted by the Science Foundation Arizona Bisgrove Scholar program, which funded his research.

In the years since, Zhao has made great strides on the frontier of LEDs in three areas.
First, Zhao and his team investigated the theoretical limits of LED efficiency and device structure bottlenecks in order to create a new and better structure that is less prone to efficiency “droop” and the limitations inherent to green LED light. Zhao says the solution lies in producing high-quality indium gallium nitride, or InGaN, with a low amount of defects and impurities. Green LED light is especially problematic because it requires InGaN with more indium, which is difficult to synthesize and is typically low quality with many defects.