Researchers Create Tiny, Flexible LED Screens

August 20, 2009

In the world of light-emitting diode screens, viewers can’t have it both ways: inorganic LED screens made of silicon are bright, efficient and last a long time, but they are expensive, heavy and difficult to make in small sizes. Organic LED screens are cheap and flexible, but they produce a lower-quality image and have a short lifespan.

Now, an interdisciplinary research team has created a new way of creating inorganic LED screens so that they are smaller, flexible and more inexpensive to make while still retaining their high quality.

“This technology could have many applications in health-monitoring devices and screen technology,” says Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.

Huang worked with professors from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and from across the globe on the research, and their results are now published online in the journal Science.

Huang and his colleagues knew that the way to reduce the cost of expensive inorganic LED screens was to reduce the material. To do this, they created ultrathin, microscale inorganic LEDs and developed a method to assemble them onto plastic substrates. This method allows them to print tiny islands of LEDs onto a surface (rather than cover the entire surface with the materials) while still keeping the image quality. The space between the islands is small enough that the human eye can’t tell the difference between it and a fully covered screen. The process uses just 1 percent of the material that standard inorganic LED screen processes use.

“You save a tremendous amount in the material cost, but you still have the same image quality,” Huang says.

This method of printing LEDs also allows for much smaller screens — even as small as a fingernail. Such a small screen could have uses in medical health-monitoring devices. But such devices, if they are to be placed on the body, need to be flexible. No worry there: Huang and his colleagues use the same “pop-up” technology to connect islands of LEDs that they previously developed to connect tiny islands of circuits used in stretchable electronics. The tiny wires allow for electronic transfer while also allowing the device to bend and stretch. This technology also allows for transparent electronics, like head-up displays, which superimpose images onto the inside of the windshield to enable pilots and drivers to view the information without looking down.
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For his part, Huang’s research group created the mechanics models for the design. His colleagues contributed through their specialties, including materials science, electrical engineering, and manufacturing.

“To work on something like this you need people from many different backgrounds,” Huang says. “We really worked together.”

Other authors of the paper include Jian Wu of Northwestern University; John A. Rogers and his research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and colleagues from Semprius, Inc., the Institute of High Performance Computing; and Tsinghua University.

This research was funded by the Ford Motor Company, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

- Emily Ayshford