In this study, the effect of ITO contact ratio for blue light micro-light-emitting diode (µLED) with dimensions 40 μm × 40 μm was assessed. The contact ratio from 0.2 to 0.8 was designed for the ratio of electrode area to light-emitting area. As the contact ratio increased from 0.2 to 0.8, the turn-on voltage of µLED decreased. It could be due to the short lateral diffusion length in multiple quantum wells (MQW) and lower parallel resistance for the µLED with a large contact ratio. The leakage currents of single µLED were below 5.1 × 10–9 A, no matter the contact ratio. It means that the contact ratio does not affect the leakage current as measured on single chip. Moreover, µLED array with a 0.8 contact ratio presented the highest output power than other samples (5.25 mW as the current density of 1875 A/cm2). It could attribute to the MQWs usage, the metal contact reflective behavior and less current crowding, which generated more carriers and extracted more lighting from the µLED. The simulation data using SpeCLED software agreed well with these experiments, and µLED with a 0.8 contact ratio showed the best optoelectronic properties.

Generally, the inductively coupled plasma-reactive ion etching (ICP-RIE) mesa technology was used to remove p-GaN/MQWs and expose n-GaN for electrical contact in a fabricated micro light-emitting diode (μLED). In this process, the exposed sidewalls were significantly damaged which result in small-sized μLED presenting a strong size-dependent influence. Lower emission intensity was observed in the μLED chip, which can be attributed to the effect of sidewall defect during etch processing. To reduce the non-radiative recombination, the ion implantation using an As+ source to substitute the ICP-RIE mesa process was introduced in this study. The ion implantation technology was used to isolate each chip to achieve the mesa process in the μLED fabrication. Finally, the As+ implant energy was optimized at 40 keV, which exhibited excellent current–voltage characteristics, including low forward voltage (3.2 V @1 mA) and low leakage current (10–9 A@− 5 V) of InGaN blue μLEDs. The gradual multi-energy implantation process from 10 to 40 keV can further improve the electrical properties (3.1 V @1 mA) of μLEDs, and the leakage current was also maintained at 10–9 A@− 5 V.