An international team of scientists led by MIT engineers has developed a way to fabricate MicroLED wafers. no defects using a vertical approach which could pave the way for a new generation of virtual reality displays and televisions.
Vertically stacked MicroLEDs could provide higher pixel density andat the same time, be much easier and cheaper to manufacturewhich would make them a boon for virtual reality headsets, where OLED has yet to find a foothold.
Traditional displays use light-emitting diodes arranged side by side, with red, blue, and green sub-pixels packed as tightly together as possible. AND Like the transistors in a CPU, this parallel arrangement is rapidly reaching its theoretical limit of density.
The MicroLED are the possible solution. They are made of inorganic semiconductor materials that are one-hundredth the size of conventional LEDs and can offer better performance, consume less power, and last longer than conventional LEDs. OLED. Instead, they require a much more precise manufacturing process to perfectly align the sub-pixels in the traditional RGB setup.
A MicroLED design that could fight OLED for years to come
Jeehwan Kim and Jiho Shin, the two MIT researchers leading the study published in Nature, have designed a new way to fabricate MicroLEDs that would not require the same extreme precision. They succeeded in stacking ultrathin membranes of leds reds, greens, and blues in a vertical configuration, with each vertical pixel measuring just four microns across.
Using a vertical stacking setup, Shin said, the pixel area could theoretically be reduced by a third. Vertical MicroLEDs could achieve a density of more than 5,000 pixels per inch, the highest ever recorded.
Scientists Got Their Vertical Pixels thanks to a previously developed method to grow and detach perfect two-dimensional material from silicon wafers and other surfaces, a process they called “2D material based layer transfer” or 2DLT.
They also demonstrated how to stimulate a single vertical structure to produce the entire commercial spectrum of colors, but now they need to develop an active matrix system capable of controlling”25 million separate LEDs“. The MicroLED is about to explode.