Fourier modal method for inverse design of metasurface-enhanced micro-LEDs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Fourier modal method-based simulation technique for micro-LEDs that is vastly faster than traditional methods, enabling efficient inverse design of metasurface-enhanced uLEDs with improved light extraction.

Contribution

The paper develops a rapid, accurate Fourier modal method extension for modeling complex uLEDs, facilitating inverse design of metasurface-enhanced devices.

Findings

Simulation speed exceeds 10^7 times that of traditional FDTD methods.

Designed a metasurface-enhanced uLED that doubles light extraction efficiency.

Method effectively models thousands of incoherent sources in micro-LEDs.

Abstract

We present a simulation capability for micro-scale light-emitting diodes (uLEDs) that achieves comparable accuracy to CPU-based finite-difference time-domain simulation but is more than 10^7 times faster. Our approach is based on the Fourier modal method (FMM) -- which, as we demonstrate, is well suited to modeling thousands of incoherent sources -- with extensions that allow rapid convergence for uLED structures that are challenging to model with standard approaches. The speed of our method makes the inverse design of uLEDs tractable, which we demonstrate by designing a metasurface-enhanced uLED that doubles the light extraction efficiency of an unoptimized device.