What’s a micro-LED?
If you’re looking for an example of nanotechnology in the world currently, look no further than your home: you’ve likely converted at least some of your lights from incandescent bulbs to LEDs to save energy. But why are LEDs so energy efficient?
Incandescent bulbs operate by heating up a filament to a temperature high enough to cause it to glow. While it works, it’s very inefficient since the electrical energy is being used to directly heat up the filament, not to produce light. On the other hand, the electrical energy used by an LED is almost directly converted into light due to the properties of the semiconductor material inside the LED.
Now that you know how LEDs work, you can probably guess what micro-LEDs are: just microscopic LEDs! Micro-LEDs are being researched for displays to determine if each pixel in a display could be a tiny LED. Our TVs, phones, smartwatches, and VR headsets would have better contrast, response times, and energy efficiency compared to LCD technology, the dominant display technology today. However, the biggest limitations to micro-LEDs’ adoption are:
- The loss in efficiency when shrinking LEDs to the micro-scale
- Expensive manufacturing equipment
- Precisely and accurately placing these tiny LEDs into a display quickly enough for mass-manufacturing
A lot of researchers and start-ups are trying to address these problems so that one day, you’ll be using a micro-LED display in your house just like your LED lights!
