Samsung’s research team claims its hit upon a new technique for manufacturing its Quantum Dot display technology that delivers some big efficiency improvements and eliminates the need to use toxic chemicals, significantly increasing the life span of the displays.
The researchers say the breakthrough could lead to its QLED panels, which use a traditional LCD panel overlaid with a Quantum Dot filter, being used more widely in commercial display products.
Samsung’s QLED displays differ from OLED in that they require backlighting as they’re not self-emitting, unlike the latter technology.
But its research efforts have been focused on trying to produce Quantum Dots that are self-emissive, just like OLED, and the initiative is finally producing some good results. The company claims it’s now able to produce red-, green- and blue-emitting QD-LEDs with efficiencies of 20.5%, 21% and 19.8%, respectively.
The technique, which is discussed in a research paper written by Dr. Eunjoo Jang, Samsung Fellow, and Dr. Yu-Ho Won, a Principal Researcher at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (pictured), and published in the journal Nature, involves using “indium phosphide-based materials” instead of a hazardous material called Cadmium.
The paper notes the technique has some major benefits for large display panels as the QD-LEDs produced offer excellent colour purity and efficiency, and are also very cost-effective to produce.
Moreover, the technique resulted in a quantum yield of almost 100%, which is enough to make mass production a viable prospect. The quantum dots also maintained a high luminescence efficiency throughout their lifespan, displaying “a theoretical maximum external quantum efficiency of 21.4%” and an extremely long lifetime that stretches to a million hours, Samsung’s researchers said.
The performance is comparable with today’s Cadmium-based QD-LEDs, Samsung added.
Samsung’s researchers said they were especially interested in commercial applications for its self-emissive QD displays, such as digital signage.
It’s not clear when the new technique will be put into practice though. Innovations of this kind can take as long as five to ten years to implement as manufacturing facilities need to be built, tested and scaled up. As such it’s likely be some time before we see the first self-emissive QD displays appearing in any products.
