New LED tech promises more flexible displays

A new LED display process could change the way you watch TV, monitor your health, and gaze out of windows.

Developed by a team of international researchers, the new process creates tiny, ultrathin inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that shine brighter and last longer than conventional LEDs.

Stretchable micro-LED display, consisting of an interconnected mesh of printed micro LEDs bonded to a rubber substrate.

(Credit: Photo by D. Stevenson and C. Conway, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois)

John Rogers, professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, teamed up with experts at Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing to create the new process, as described in a news story published Thursday by the University of Illinois and in the journal Science.

Micro_LED display printed on a thin sheet of plastic, wrapped around a finger.

(Credit: Photo by D. Stevenson and C. Conway, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois)

Inorganic LEDs are bright and long-lasting, but they're costly, thick, and difficult to manufacture. Organic LEDs are cheaper and easier to make, thinner, and can be applied to flexible surfaces. The new process combines the best of both worlds.

"Our goal is to marry some of the advantages of inorganic LED technology with the scalability, ease of processing and resolution of organic LEDs," said Rogers. "By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated, and assembled."

The technology could pave the way for TV screens that you roll up and brake light indicators that fit the contour of your car.

One especially promising use for flexible LED sheets lies in the medical field. "Wrapping a stretchable sheet of tiny LEDs around the human body offers interesting opportunities in biomedicine and biotechnology," said Rogers, "including applications in health monitoring, diagnostics, and imaging."

[EvanSei]

I love LED's and I think we can all agree they are the future I know they have ben around a long time but they have never ben used like they are now, have you seen the new LED t.v. by Samsung wow that thing is thin! can't wait to see what else is on the way

[tech_crazy]

If the thinness of the Samsung awes you, you should definitely see the Sony OLED TV

[abundantsnotbob]

Laptop monitors are less than an inch thick, but noone seems to be impressed by that. So why can't they use the same process for making TVs

[jsisson01]

@ abundantsnotbob: Laptop monitors are LCD technology, also, they are dumb devices. You're forgetting the rest of the laptop that is connected to it in order to make it work. That's one of the reasons why they are not that thin. With the advent of this LED technology, if the display can be printed on a thin roll of plastic, the subsequent thickness of the overall display can be reduced. LED's also use less energy and less overall parts to make it work vs LCD which require more power and more IC's to control what is being displayed.

[SuPaGrAm]

abundantsnotbob;

TV's aren't as thin because they are probably twenty or more times the surface area. You'd be suprised how much of that thickness is plastic and metal for stregnth rather than the actual LCD (or LED, OLED and whatever else)

[solitare_pax]

Apple has been switching over to lighter, low-power LEDs as the lighting source for LCD monitors since the introduction of the Macbook Air - removing the old florescent type illumination that will not last as long, and contains mercury- so it is good news for the environment. Odds are, we will see more of them in the future.

Now if they could only get the cost of LED light bulbs down...

[Willie Winkie]

l have been hearing about flexible displays for years now. So far there is only one flexible display technology that is actually in production. You guessed it, a sheet of paper.

[clrgj2]

man I want that one

[oby3000]

? oled is already supposed to be able to do this. yes its nice put some more research into it but can we start manufacturing what we already have and sell it to fund for more research.i mean like more tv s even if they are more expensive . i see we already got it in devices like the zune hd and other cell phones and such. even if size is a restriction on tvs right now that can be solved later.

[inachu]

How about disolving LED that would be used like body paint?

[hoangdiep2707]

abundantsnotbob: Laptop monitors are LCD technology, also, they are dumb devices. You're forgetting the rest of the laptop that is connected to it in order to make it work. That's one of the reasons why they are not that thin. With the advent of this LED technology, if the display can be printed on a thin roll of plastic, the subsequent thickness of the overall display can be reduced. LED's also use less energy and less overall parts to make it work vs LCD which require more power and more IC's to control what is being displayed. !

[Mergatroid Mania]

This is nice, but as others have stated we're been hearing about flexible LCDs for years and have seen nothing come of it.

Also, OLEDs have been around for a while. Has this company solved the longevity problem to allow all the colours in the display to last the same amount of time?

I can see a doctor walking into a patients room and tapping a button on his tablet, the sheet the patient has over him lights up and shows a complete diagram of the patients innards animated and displaying all the medical information.

I can also see unfolding a large piece of paper that lights up into a map (ala Babylon AD).

[Endbringer]

I've been hearing about thin displays that can roll up for years. Once something like this is actually made, I can see many uses for it. One would be for mapping and construction. I don't think people realize how much paper is used when something is built. One set of plans for a building can be up to 140 sheets on E size paper (30" x 42"). That's a lot of paper. Combine that with how many building plans your local government building department keeps and you can see how it adds up. With a roll up display, plans can be shown from a flash drive hooked to it and taken to the field.

[SactoGuy018]

I think the place where OLEDs will really be important is in larger flat panel displays. Imagine OLED panels the size of today's larger flat LCD panels but with tiny fraction of the power consumption, since OLED panels don't need power-wasting backlighting. Because of no need for a backlight, they can be amazingly thin, limited by the structural integrity needed for such a large panel (they'll probably be about 0.375 inches thick at most if the panel uses glass or scratchproof plastic elements). And because OLED can "switch" on and off at incredibly fast speeds, it also means totally no motion blur problems, mostly because the "refresh rate" is measured in the thousands of times per second!