Reliability study of Au-in solid-liquid interdiffusion bonding for GaN-based vertical LED packaging

An In-rich Au-In bonding system has been developed to transfer vertical light-emitting diodes (VLEDs) from a sapphire to a graphite substrate and enable them to survive under n-ohmic contact treatment at 350 °C. The bonding temperature is 210 °C, and three intermetallic compounds are detected: AuIn, AuIn₂, and γ phase. As a result, the remelting temperature increases beyond the theoretical value of 450 °C according to the Au-In binary phase diagram. In fact, reliability testing showed that joints obtained by rapid thermal annealing at 400 °C for 1 min survived whereas those obtained at 500 °C for 1 min failed. Finally, a GaN-based blue VLED was transferred to the graphite substrate by means of the proposed bonding method, and its average light output power was measured to be 386.6 mW (@350 mA) after n-ohmic contact treatment. This wafer-level bonding technique also shows excellent potential for high-temperature packing applications.