Blue LED Production Fails Because of Magnesium

Scientific American reported that UK scientists think that the difficulty in making blue LEDs could be attributed to magnesium, a key ingredient in making the semiconductor sandwich required for such LEDs.

As quoted in the market news:

Blue LEDs won their inventor’s last year’s physivs Nobel prize and they have been heralded as the next step in solid state lighting. Combining them with red and green LEDs, which are simpler to make, they can be used to create exceptionally efficient white lighting. However, manufacturing problems have persisted and blue LEDs are still much more expensive than their red and green counterparts.

John Buckeridge of University College London stated:

[The] magnesium substituting for the gallium acts as a very deep trap for the hole it produces. The amount of energy it would take to free that would be so much that you would end up melting the gallium nitride.

Click here for the full Scientific American report