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MIT Develops Quantum-Dot OLEDs
deglr6328 writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of Organic Light emitting Diode (OLED) using Cadmium Selenium Quantum Dots as the electron-hole recombination layer. It is widely believed that the next generation of flexible flat panel display technologies will be self luminous (non-backlit) organic light emitting diodes. However, the efficiency and lifespan of both small molecule and polymer type OLEDs, to date, has been poor for small wavelength emitting compounds. Using quantum dots as the emissive layer in OLEDs potentially solves both of these problems since they are inorganic and won't degrade, and they have a theoretical maximum quantum efficiency of near 100%. Mmmmm ... can't wait to buy my first roll-up display!"
Haven't roll-up displays been "two years away" for about seven years now?
I love the concept... but really, shouldn't we have at least one low quality, high priced, first generation consumer product by now?
sig.
They need a new acronym I think. . .
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But No! It's better to conform to existing buzzwords to be correct. .
Aaargh.
I hope they are as sharp and readable as the current LCD screens. One great advantage to LCD screens is that they are significantly easier on the eyes than CRT monitors.
If this new technology is cheaper or has some other substantial improvement over LCDs, most manufacturers may stop selling LCD monitors or laptops using LCD screens. Those of us that look for easy to read screens may lose out.
OLEDs potentially solves both of these problems since they are inorganic
Given this is quantum physics, perhaps this is an example of the uncertainty principle? Inquiring minds want to know...
This is fantastic. In 5 years I'll be able to pin up my TV with thumb tacks right next to my tattered SG poster. This opens up a whole new relm of potential practical jokes for people who don't know it's a display. ;)
Hopefully this is the kind of technology breakthrough that will make it possible to get these massive flat screens in our living rooms one day!
now you too can be a walking billboard! imagine 2000x6000 pixel ads right on your tshirt!
the more i hear, the less i believe. show me or screw it.
* containing carbon
* back to nature
* obtained from living things
... but then it turned out I didn't care, as long as I get hi-resolution gaming. -theGreater.
For some reasons the companies are just dumbass anal about it. They're have been flexible "e-paper" displays since 2000 as trials in federated department stores macys.
2 main companies currently lead the pack, BOTH have production facilities:
http://www.gyriconmedia.com/ Uses beads. berkeley->Xerox-parc->private. production fac. in michigan.
http://www.eink.com/ Uses organics but no where near as small as quantum dot-anything. MIT -> private. Manufacturing facility in Japan.
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Yes, LCD's are easier on the eyes...but working all the time in front of a screen seems to change my skin color to a pale green'ish.
I want to get sunburn when I code!
UVOLED anyone?...please....
I thought this interesting technology would also have such first-generation products too...
I remember being a freshman in college, and making a dork of myself by telling all my friends how these things would be out in a year and how massively cool they would be. Oh, and electronic paper too. And those things had prototypes and everything. And even if they didn't, in 5 years or so a plasma display would only cost as much as a CRT.
Let's fast-forward 7 years to the present and there's an announcement that a lab has created a device, and we translate this to mean that functional products are just around the corner.
Excuse me for being such a cynic, but until something hits store shelves at an affordable price, its pretty pointless to get excited.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
Apparently these displays would have a short lifespan. We would then have disposable screens. That seems a perfect consumer target: cheap, glowing, quickly obsolete.
You wouldn't know whether it's organic or not until you opened the box.
but imagine if your "smart" BDUs have a software error and suddenly give you a full body "blue screen of death!"
Does this mean that each pixel would be so quantom sized? What sort of graphics card would be needed to drive something like that for a 15" display?!
My roommates in grad school were working on this type of thing, and they were promising resolutions over 300 DPI. That makes me salivate, but I find it funny that for once display technology will be more advanced than image generation technology. (video cards) A 300 DPI, 17" widescreen would be a resolution of something like 4500x2500, or 11 million pixels, compared to 1 or 2 million pixels in a high-res display today. AGP 32X anyone?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Now this is news for nerds and stuff that matters! We've been reading about this for years now and everytime the technology gets better and better, but when will we get it? I hope it's really soon.
But it's very good to hear that they're making progress and that it's getting closer. I'm still worried about the framerate though using organic displays.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of Organic Light emitting Diode (OLED) using Cadmium Selenium Quantum Dots as the electron-hole recombination layer
Great, they contain Cadmium. Yet another device with heavy metals in it to polute our landfills and the environment. At least is doesn't have Mercury in it like Florescent light bulbs do.
I want glasses with a high resolution display. Perhaps even with seperate displays for each eye, for that nice 3D effect.
This would be so much better than big screen tv's. For one we could eventually have as big a screen as the largest movie theater.
I could also watch movies/tv in bed without keeping the missus awake with blinking lights.
They would need to cost about $150 a piece for them to break through. But then it would be the best thing since sliced bread.
Max M - IT's Mad Science
He looks like an escapee of a TJ Hooker episode gone wrong.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, sig changes you!
using quantum dots does not solve the total efficiency problem. The overall efficiency of a LED is the product of the injection efficiency, the extraction efficiency, and the internal quantum efficiency. The inorganic quantum dots will make the internal quantum efficiency large, this is how well the device converts the injected electrons into light. However, the big stumbling block is the injection effeciency, how well the injected current is converted to electron-hole pairs for generating light. When this efficiency is low, a large amount of the applied power is lost to heat. This will need to be overcome as well before OLEDs of any type make as a commercial technology.
Also the cadmium selenide system is known to have lifetime issues. These, and related, materials were the first candidates for blue/green LEDs and lasers but suffered from horrible lifetimes.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
We're finally getting rid of extremely toxic cadmium in batteries and now this? Don't these guys learn? They have to engineer over the whole like cycle, including disposal.
The point of the article is that they have managed to use an inorganic layer in between just two organic layers and produce a magnitude of light equivalent to earlier efforts with 20 layers. These things have 25 times(!) the power efficiency. This might also be the first commercial application of quantum dots.
I wonder what - except from electric power - systems will consume in the near future. I try to feed my notebook bread and cheese, but it doesn't seem to be very fond of it.
Or... organic. What kind of life are we talking here? Do they kill animals to create these displays? Damn, I know some people think it's stupid, but I'm a vegetarian.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
I'm trying to get my head around the 'self-luminous' bit. So you can't switch them off? What happens when you shut the lid of your portable and put it in its sack for the night? Does it keep the case warm? If these screens are going to be readable in the same conditions as a newspaper, they are going to need to kick out several watts.
Also, I can think of several options for where the power comes from, and none of them fill me with confidence. It could be radioactive, it could be organic (ie your screen is going to gradually eat itself, or do you pour glucose solution into the VGA socket?)...
Is anyone getting anywhere with passive displays, ie systems which work by reflection not emission, and therefore don't need illuminating at all?
Virtually serving coffee
Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of Organic Light emitting Diode
...
since they are inorganic
This is like the episode of star trek where picard and some scientist debate if Data is a lifeform or not.
In normal LCD panels, the LCD itself just blocks light in strategic areas, and the image is formed by a light source that is behind the panel. This technology claims that the electricity will be passed through each pixel, which will produce the light necessary itself.
They are using cadmium, a nasty horrid posionous heavy metal that causes polution and soon to be banned from use in the European Union. Even lead in solder is to be banned shortly. Mercury another posionous heavy metal has already been banned.
I wonder sometimes if "the powers that be" aren't just holding back on some of the new LCD-like display technologies because they've got a lot of money tied up in LCD technology that's just starting to show a return on investment.
And there's the whole recession thing, which has limited sales and maybe curtailed manufacturers' desire to invest in converting plants and equipment to make the new displays.
I know it seems a little conspiratorial, and the answer probably that the technology isn't reliable or mass producable yet, but I still can't help but wonder if the economy picks up we'll see from Apple or someone else not afraid to roll out an expensive 1st gen product and then see it approach commodity levels a couple of years later.
Although I keep asking myself why a 13" LCD TV sells for $800 and a 17" LCD monitor is $500. That's a market contrast I *don't* get, and the explanations I've been given about the cost of tuners and IR control logic don't add up, especially when a tube 20" is $170.
I have several ideas with what I would like to do with this technology.
FIRST: make an invisible suit...you know the old deal with the cameras displaying the stuff on you so you look like your background or at least enough like it to blend in
SECOND: make an invisible *james bond* car
THIRD: make an invisible *harry potter* cloak
FOURTH: make my ceiling display some high quality pron for those kinky nights.
*Bows*
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Let's replace lead-based CRTs with Cadmium-based displays and call it "organic". So cheap they'll become disposable.
"Mmmmm ... can't wait to buy my first roll-up display!"
Darn it, I mistook my ultra-cool roll-up display with Mars background image for a Strawberry Fruit Roll-up! Now my stomach is trying to connect to Windows Update and I don't feel very good...
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Interacting with a machine-- or being entertained by one-- should not exclude interacting with the world and people around you. You want to cuddle up on the couch with the missus, don your goggles, and ignore each other's presence for the duration of the movie? How about not being able to find the beer and pretzels you set down during a football game? Having to put on and take off your goggles repeatedly when you want to look up from the website you're reading?
Thin flat displays are definitely a solution-- magic goggles seem like a niche thing with limited usefulness, to me.
"It is widely believed that the next generation of flexible flat panel display technologies will be self luminous (non-backlit) organic light emitting diodes."
That's good to hear. IMHO, backlit light-emitting diodes were overkill in the lumens department.
i'm just waiting for them to replace LCD technology, which i've never been a fan of ... unless you've got an amazingly expensive unit, the lighting on most LCDs really sucks ... it would simply make for better image quality if each pixel could emit its own light, as with OLEDs and CRTs ...
</rant>
09
And on a lighter note, Bill Gates hailed this breakthrough as just the thing needed for thier SPOT technology to revolutionize the use of toilet tissue in the home.
He was quoted as saying "Imagine the potential impact of being able to stream news, sports and advertisements to this often overlooked segment of the market in real-time."
MSFT was down 5% on the announcment.
... the next generation of flexible flat panel display technologies ...
... where was the first generation of these?
I realize I've been on a bender since New Year's Eve, but
The only flexible flat panel I've ever seen was this palmpilot my friend sat down on, 'tho I really doubt it qualified as a display technology after he crushed it.
If the resolution is high enough, why not !! ;)
Actually I think they are torturing baby cameleons to change color.
Also look at the handhelds in E:FC. They have a pullout screen that rolls into the handheld portion. I have a Sony NR70V, and the video on that is quite nice. With a rolling screen, you could seriously make one running with 3G.
...tizzyd
Maybe every electron-hole combination generates a photon of light but IIRC the direction in which the photon of light travels is random.
That means that at least 50% of the photons are travelling the wrong direction... Perhaps the most optimistic view is that 40% are travelling forwards from the OLED screen, the remainder are absorbed back into the substrate and turned into heat.
Maybe someone would like to correct me...
ttfn
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
If they can use standard methods to lay down the cadmium (CVD or something), then the total amount of toxic material could well be microscopic.
Gallium Arsenide semiconductors (used in diodes, microwave applications, etc.) are incredibly toxic, but you don't see huge cleanup efforts due to the material - due partly to the high price of the substrate. Once you get out of the foundry, toxicity concerns drop by orders of magnitude.
1. Make Organic (Inorganic?? its not clear) Display 2. Sell it 3. Make money 4. Say that it is bad for the enviroment because of the Cadmium 5. Come up with one without Cadmium 6. Sell it 7. Make MORE money
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
I feel like I'm reading the transcript of a conversation between the cyborg and the Reading Rainbow guy on Star Trek.
Otherwise Back to the Future II might be future-historically inaccurate! It would sure be a shame if it turned out that window shades couldn't actually broadcast beautiful views 24 hours a day in 2015...
E-Ink is working on color displays.
The pages aren't clear on how they try to achive
this. But I think they're using microcapsules filled
with C, M or Y colored liquid and also black and
white pigments with opposite electrostatic charges.
Come up with a new theory for solar cells and you can boast that it has the potential for nearly 100% efficiency, but the proof is in the pudding, and we all know how long it's taking thin flexible display pudding to set...
Kevin Fox
http://www.mbl.edu/publications/Loligo/squid/skin. 0.html
On the other hand, wallpaper = display would be great. You could change colors and patterns when ever you want, even to 'set the mood'. I could design rooms without worrying where the TV is going, because it could be (on) any wall and at any height/size. Heck, if it's luminescent you could even light the room!
we used to have a continent here before the components were banned didn't we?
How about 3 dimensional displays suspended in a matrix of transparent substrate? If these generate light and are flexible, why not create true 3D displays that we could walk around and manipulate?
Fast forward to the year 2018 at a local Circuit City:
Sales clerk: "Quantum what?"
It's wonderful to have such a convenient organic device. I can't wait to buy mine!
Yeah, it wasn't a great movie, but I was really taken with that vision of display technology. In addition to the "roll-up-ability" it had the (presumably) variable translucency. I'm not an engineer by nature, but that left me understanding why some men will spend their lives obsessed with building a device that can do something new.
if anyone is interested, here are some older /. articles dating back to 1998 about OLED's.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=OLED
the way sarcasm is lost on you slashdorks.