Graphene Based Display Paves Way For Semi-Transparent Electronic Devices

hypnosec writes University of Manchester and University of Sheffield researchers have managed to produce the first graphene-based LED displays, which could pave the way for efficient, flexible and semi-transparent electronic devices. The research, published in scientific journal Nature Materials [abstract; article is paywalled], shows how graphene displays and related 2D materials could be utilised to create light emitting devices for the next-generation of mobile phones, tablets and televisions to make them incredibly thin and durable. The LED device was constructed by combining different 2D crystals and emits light from across its whole surface. Being so thin, at only 10-40 atoms thick, these new components could form the basis for the first generation of semi-transparent smart devices.

Comments

Why?

[richy freeway]

Why do we want semi transparent smart devices?

Re:Why?

[OneSmartFellow]

So you can see the chips and battery inside of it ?

Good frigging question

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a bowl of soup that would not only display the amount of calories you ingest with every spoonful, but also prod incessantly about your body weight. Now extend this technology to plates and other diningware, and combine it with forks that hum a joyful morse code rendition of 'O Come All Ye Fatties.

And hey presto, your nextgen transparent diningware cuts the obesity rate by 10%.

And surely you've thought about the endless potential of having corporations advertise the latest and greatest diet coke formula right under your chicken dinner. Glow in the dark transparent silverware that displays the moisture content of the air and the latest headline from TMZ.

We need this, you need this Citizen.

Re:Why?

[pr0fessor]

I don't know about semi-transparent but flexible so that it doesn't break so easily would be nice.

Re:Why?

[BreakBad]

XZibit

Re:Why?

[TuringTest]

Why do we want semi transparent smart devices?

Take a look at augmented reality.

Re:Why?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

We don't. Just like we don't want our coffee makers on the web, or our every online move tracked by companies.

What makes you think consumer demand matters? Build it, and then manufacture the demand.

Re:Why?

[Thanshin]

Why do we want semi transparent smart devices?

Because they are newer than opaque smart devices.

Re:Why?

[leftover]

Distributed deserializers and switches on Ludicrous-Density displays?

Re:Why?

[green1]

Except whenever a device has any flex to it we hear people complain that it doesn't feel solid enough or premium enough, so people scream for metal frames instead of plastic etc.(Current technology can do plenty of flex from the stand point of avoiding breakage, but people don't want it.)

Re:Why?

[ArcadeMan]

Mmm... chips... <noise="gargle">

Re:Why?

[squiggleslash]

This morning I woke up and knew that getting coffee would be a chore involving going over to the kitchen, setting everything up, waiting a few minutes, etc. I would like a coffee maker that truly is controllable from the web, right down to adding coffee grounds and adding water.

OTOH, web enabled coffee makers thus far appear to solely be about telling you if there's any left. Which I agree, is not really a killer app.

Re:Why?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

This morning I woke up and knew that getting coffee would be a chore involving going over to the kitchen, setting everything up, waiting a few minutes

They make coffee makers that you fill with beans and water the night before, and it will grind the coffee and start the brewing so it is ready at a precise time. I have no objection to a programmable device. I even have no real objection to a LAN controllable device. My objection is to a device that connects to the internet. Because that last leap is just to spy on me.

Or in other words, I've never been on vacation and been like "must make coffee right now."

Re:Why?

[tlhIngan]

Why do we want semi transparent smart devices?

Well, we can use them for HUDs so you can display information while still keeping your eyes on the road.

Integrate them into glasses and you can do a Google Glass style overlays - great for workers who need to access technical documentation and other things while deep inside a complex piece of equipment. Or first responders who can get information when they need it without having to look at equipment (firefighters would love to have a moving map of their location when you're navigating through smoke, as well as thermal imagery to help locate victims, and to do both without looking at a handheld so they can keep situational awareness).

Add controllable transparency and you can use them in "smart windows" that can be used to show the outside or replace it with something else if the weather isn't good.

Re:Why?

[squiggleslash]

Yeah, mine has a timer, but that does mean setting it up the night before...

In other news, squiggleslash wins award for "Most lazy person".

Re:Why?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

mine has a timer, but that does mean setting it up the night before...

There's no way around that, unless you want a robot or something. Because the grounds won't put themselves in the coffee maker. And you can program it to work 5 days a week. Hell, you can even hook a water line up.

Re:Why?

[siddesu]

You can't keep your eyes 'on the road' if you're looking at semi-transparent display. These are for the self-driving cars.

Re:Why?

[michael_cain]

Because that last leap is just to spy on me.

Or to allow hackers to brick your coffee maker, so you have to buy a new one.

Re:Why?

[squiggleslash]

I'm now "designing" something in my head that does all that. You load it with a coffee brick from time to time (it'll send an email when you're low), and obviously have to hook it up to the water, but otherwise it does the rest. Log in five minutes before you want coffee, enter how many mugs you'll want, and that's it.

Plus the ability to schedule them, obviously. And presumably some modern AI logic along the lines of "I see the in-laws are over, that means you'll want me to start making four cups of coffee right after you stop cooking, and also make four additional cups first thing in the morning."

Of course, if I think about this any more I'll need to consult this: http://xkcd.com/1205/

Re:HUD in a car?

[popo]

For that you don't need a transparent device. You just need a transparent display.

Those are two different things actually.

Everything old is new again

[Crashmarik]

Change Graphene to OLED and you will be able to use all the old news stories from 10 years ago.

Re:Everything old is new again

[houghi]

find http://slashdot.org/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/OLED/Graphene/g'

Yep, it works.

Re:Everything old is new again

[ArmoredDragon]

OLED would work well if it didn't have such a bad half-life (at least if the blue component didn't have a bad half-life) which causes the display to turn yellow as it ages. I haven't heard anybody discuss what the half-life of graphene is though, so it could be just as bad.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Crashmarik]

Well there's the rub. Graphene is in that monumental hype phase where no one really considers the problems with it.

Re:Everything old is new again

[dkf]

I haven't heard anybody discuss what the half-life of graphene is though, so it could be just as bad.

They're probably still working that out. It's one thing to know that it's theoretically possible, but another to demonstrate how to actually do it, so the report that it has been done (even if it turns out to not be very useful in the end) is relevant.

Re:Everything old is new again

[slimshady76]

We still have to find a cheap, commercial way to produce graphene, so until that happens, the mean life of it it's close to zero.

Seriously, I'm tired of all these promises of graphene going from curing cancer and HIV to building everlasting batteries out of it to transmitting petabytes of information over a carbon-thick wire... Producing just a small amount of this "miracle material" costs a lot, can't be used out of a lab-controlled environment and it's polluting as hell. Until all of that gets reversed, it's unusable.

Re:Everything old is new again

[TeknoHog]

Yep, it works.

That's what she sed.

Re:HUD in a car?

[TWX]

Heads' up displays in cars have been available on and off since the eighties. They're typically projector-based and use glass or an applique on the glass that reflects only where the projector points.

Speaking of display issues (OFFTOPIC)

[gman003]

Did nobody at DICE test the CSS changes? Because the front page is broken on a 960px-wide window now, and it wasn't yesterday. Since that's a window pinned to half of a 1080p screen, and /. doesn't come close to actually needing a full 1920px, I'm sure there's a lot of people browsing the same way, and I'm sure a lot of them won't be browsing back if you keep fucking basic shit up like this.

Re:Speaking of display issues (OFFTOPIC)

[ArcadeMan]

A simple browser window resizing seems to give me 1192 pixels wide as the minimum required for this page.

Re:Speaking of display issues (OFFTOPIC)

[gman003]

Addendum: this is no longer the case on the front page, but page 2 is now broken in the same way. It seems to be caused by the image on "Listnr Wants to be 'Your Listening Assistant' (Video)".

I do not recall having problems with video posts before, so I still suspect some recent CSS changes are breaking things that were once working. Was the lesson not learned after Beta? Don't break things that currently work.

Re:HUD in a car?

[houghi]

Yes, so it would not be a HUD perhaps, but the screen could be a display. That way it could work during the day as well.

Re:HUD in a car?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why all the negative replies to your question. Current car HUDs are far from ideal - they don't work well in daylight, and the resolution is usually poor, limiting the amount of information that can be shown. A high-resolution semi-transparent display, if it was transparent enough to see clearly through, and bright enough to see activated pixels in daylight, could be a big step forward in in-car HUDs. Sounds like there's a long way to go until there are actual products based on this tech though.

Re:HUD in a car?

[The Grim Reefer]

I'm sure they could, but I'd pass on it. Do you have any idea how much that would add to the cost of the windshield? I have a car with a HUD. To avoid ghosting, the part of the windshield that it is projected onto is thinner than the rest. This makes the cost of the windshield itself $1200. Imagine what the cost would be to imbed this.

Big whoop

[RogueWarrior65]

Wake me when a low-power display can be read in full noon desert sunlight.

Re:Big whoop

[Digicrat]

You mean like e-ink. Their latest versions are even "semi-flexible" and now support color.

Re:HUD in a car?

[FatdogHaiku]

Yes, so it would not be a HUD perhaps, but the screen could be a display. That way it could work during the day as well.

So... maybe something to let me play Call of Duty Advanced Warfare while I'm driving to work?
That would be so much better than Candy Crush or just texting... </jk>

Re:HUD in a car?

[war4peace]

The cost would be smaller than imbedding a mistress...

Semi-Transparent

[ThatsNotPudding]

A synonymous phrase for Semi-Transparent could be Low-Contrast. Or Migraine-Amplifier.

iPhone 6 Plus

[DarthVain]

I hear it is pretty flexible already...

Re:HUD in a car?

[The Grim Reefer]

Very true.

Mumbles something about stupid spell check on phone...

Why this is interesting

[Required Snark]

This demonstrates the use of graphene in a band gap structure. Diodes and transistors work because of band gaps, which is achieved in silicon by doping into N type and P type regions. There is no easy way to do the equivalent in graphene, so building active components is hard.

They created a structure with band gaps by layering multiple materials including graphene.

We describe light-emitting diodes (LEDs) made by stacking metallic graphene, insulating hexagonal boron nitride and various semiconducting monolayers into complex but carefully designed sequences. Our first devices already exhibit an extrinsic quantum efficiency of nearly 10% and the emission can be tuned over a wide range of frequencies by appropriately choosing and combining 2D semiconductors (monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides). By preparing the heterostructures on elastic and transparent substrates, we show that they can also provide the basis for flexible and semi-transparent electronics.

The technique they used was van der Waals epitaxy.

On the other hand, such layered materials as graphite, mica, MoS2 or GaSe, have a lamellar structure consisting of two-dimensional unit layers. Each unit layer is formed via strong covalent or ionic type bonds, while there is no strong bond between two unit layers; they are bound together via van der Waals-type weak interaction. Then layered materials can be easily cleaved and the clean cleaved surface has a very wide and flat terrace without an active dangling bond. When the thin film growth is investigated on such an inactive surface of a layered material, only weak interaction works between the substrate and the grown material. This results in far small lattice-mismatch distortion in the grown film even if it has a different lattice constant or a crystal structure from the substrate.

If you want pretty pictures, look here. This one is very unusual, because it exhibits a spiral pattern.