“A thousand times brighter than OLED”: How cheap material that will revolutionize solar panels could one day finally make your laptop screen readable in bright sunlight
The ULTRA-LUX project, led by technology company Imec, has developed a new type of light-emitting diode (LED) – known as perovskite LEDs (PeLED) – that could one day make OLED screens a thing of the past.
Some of the best TVs and the best laptops nowadays use OLED technology (organic LED) in their displays – a technology in which each pixel is its own light source.
It has become extremely popular in recent years and the technology is increasingly being adopted by manufacturers for all kinds of devices, but researchers now claim to have adopted this technology with the invention of PeLEDs.
Is it time to say goodbye to OLED? Probably not.
“This new architecture of transport layers, transparent electrodes and perovskite as an active semiconductor material can operate at electrical current densities tens of thousands of times higher (3 kA cm-2) than conventional OLEDs,” says Paul Heremans, senior at Imec. colleague and principal investigator.
OLED uses carbon-based thin-film materials as a semiconductor, but displays are limited by a relatively low maximum brightness; the power density is 300 times smaller than that of LEDs using III-V crystalline semiconductors.
For example, it means you won’t be able to use your OLED smartphone properly on a bright, sunny day. LCD screens, on the other hand, offer weaker individual pixels but can instead provide a brighter overall image.
However, researchers from the ULTRA-LUX project have harnessed the potential of perovskite – a class of material with a specialized crystal structure – to serve as a semiconductor in LED displays. In doing so, they have created a display technology that can be up to 1,000 times brighter than the most modern OLEDs, according to research published in Nature.
This material, which is used in solar cells, can withstand very high current densities, but has not yet been used in such a way that it emits light in a display. Using their architecture, Imec demonstrated the potential of PeLEDs in future displays, and the researchers now plan to build one.
However, it may still be a few years before we see displays on the market powered by this type of display technology, as there is still quite a bit of research and engineering to be done.