Process combines LED technologies

A new process has been developed for creating thin, small inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and assembling them into large arrays.

Applications for the arrays, which can be printed onto flat or flexible substrates ranging from glass to plastic and rubber, include general illumination, high-resolution home theatre displays, wearable health monitors and biomedical imaging devices.

'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 John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Rogers and collaborators at the university developed the process with researchers at Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Compared to organic LEDs, inorganic LEDs are brighter, more robust and longer lived. Organic LEDs, however, are attractive because they can be formed on flexible substrates, in dense, interconnected arrays. The researchers’ new technology combines features of both.