Nanosphere lithography is an inexpensive, simple, high-throughput nanofabrication process. NSL can be done in different ways, such as drop coating, spin coating or by means of tilted evaporation. Nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are applied in different places, such as liquid crystal displays and traffic signals. The characteristics of gallium nitride (GaN)-based LEDs can be enhanced by fabricating nanopatterns on the top surface of the LEDs. In this work, we created differently sized (420, 320 and 140 nm) nanopatterns on the upper surfaces of GaN-based LEDs using a modified nanosphere lithography technique. This technique is quite different from conventional NSL. The characterization of the patterned GaN-based LEDs revealed a dependence on the size of the holes in the pattern created on the LED surface. The depths of the patterns were 80 nm as confirmed by AFM. Both the photoluminescence and electroluminescence intensities of the patterned LEDs were found to increase with an increase in the size of holes in the pattern. The light output power of the 420-nm hole-patterned LED was 1.16 times higher than that of a conventional LED. Moreover, the current-voltage characteristics were improved with the fabrication of differently sized patterns over the LED surface using the proposed nanosphere lithography method.

This work presents a fabrication procedure to make large-area, size-tunable, periodically different shape metal arrays using nanosphere lithography (NSL) combined with ashing and annealing. A polystyrene (PS, 580 μm) monolayer, which was used as a mask, was obtained with a mixed solution of PS in methanol by multi-step spin coating. The mask morphology was changed by oxygen RIE (Reactive Ion Etching) ashing and temperature processing by microwave heating. The Au or Pt deposition resulted in size tunable nano patterns with different morphologies such as hole and dots. These processes allow outstanding control of the size and morphology of the particles. Various sizes of hole patterns were obtained by reducing the size of the PS sphere through the ashing process, and by increasing the size of the PS sphere through annealing treatment, which resulted in tcontrolling the size of the metallic nanoparticles from 30 nm to 230 nm.