Operating Lifetime Study of Ultraviolet (UV) Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Products

Abstract

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can emit radiation that spans the range from near infrared (IR) to all three bands of ultraviolet (UV) radiation: UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C. This report focuses on LEDs that emit in one of the three UV bands because they have the potential to displace lowpressure mercury vapor (LPMV) lamps in a variety of industrial processes, including ink and adhesive curing, medical procedures, and germicidal disinfection. However, before emerging UV LED technologies can displace LPMV lamps, the efficiency and reliability of these sources must meet the user's expectations in each application. An earlier report focused on the construction and initial performance of commercial UV LED products in radiometric and current-voltage (I-V) tests [1]. This report focuses on the long-term performance and reliability of the same set of commercial products. The intent of this report is to provide to the lighting industry a benchmark of the state of UV LEDs as of mid-2021 when these products were purchased. Understanding the failure modes and failure rates of UV LEDs is important in improving UV product reliability at the LED, lamp, and luminaire level and is critical to developing products with higher efficiency, lower carbon footprint, and significantly reduced environmental impact than LPMV lamps.Operating Lifetime Study of Ultraviolet (UV) Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Products viii maintenance [RFM] was 0.50 or lower). Four products (i.e., UV-3, UV-5, UV-9, and UV-11) did not experience any failures during RTOL-1, but the other nine products had failure rates ranging from 10% to 100%. The most common failure mode was a parametric failure, which accounted for 50 failures during the test. Only seven DUTs failed abruptly, and four out of these seven devices were UV-2 DUTs. These findings demonstrate that there is a wide range of reliability in commercially available UV LED products.Different DUTs of the 13 UV LED products were divided into two groups for RTOL-2 based on their power rating. Group-A, which had If values less than 55 milliampere (mA), was operated for 2,500 hrs during RTOL-2, whereas Group-B, which had If values greater than 100 mA, was operated for 3,000 hrs during RTOL-2. Even though product operation times were longer in RTOL-2 compared with RTOL-1, the cumulative failure rate was lower, as might be expected for the milder stress conditions (i.e., lower If values). A total of 32 failures occurred during RTOL-2 (which is 25% of the total product population): 11 abrupt failures and 21 parametric failures. This finding corresponds to a cumulative failure rate of 25%. Most of the failures during RTOL-2 were concentrated in fewer products; this observation was in contrast to findings from RTOL-1, during which failures were more widespread. For example, during RTOL-2, 7 abrupt failures occurred in the UV-2 DUTs and a greater than 50% parametric failure rate was measured for the UV-8 and UV-14 DUTs. These three products accounted for 22 out of the 32 failures recorded in RTOL-2.Based on this work and combine...

Investigation of the Long-Term Aging Characteristics of Chip-On-Board LEDs: Operating Lifetime Study

“…The findings from these measurements indicate that the electrical characteristics of the COB LED DUTs during RTOL testing changed little between the beginning and end of the study which is in sharp contrast to the recent study of ultraviolet (UV) LEDs. In the study of UV LED I-V characteristics, significant changes in the electrical properties of the UV LEDs occurred during I-V measurements as a result of trap-assisted tunneling at sub-threshold voltages [21]. These electrical changes accounted for some of the radiant flux depreciation in UV LEDs.…”