A consortium of UK and US researchers plans to build microscopic laser diodes and transistors directly onto the same chip, replacing the separate components and wiring used in today’s displays and data links. Current micro-displays—used in smartwatches, augmented-reality headsets, and helmet-mounted displays—rely on microLEDs that cannot keep up with demands for higher resolution and efficiency. Similarly, visible-light communication (VLC), which could ease congestion on Wi-Fi and 5G by using unlicensed light bandwidth roughly 300 THz wide, is held back by slow, conventional LED drivers. The global micro-display market is predicted to reach $4.2 billion by 2025, and the VLC market to exceed $8 billion by 2030, but neither can meet performance targets with existing technology. The team proposes a fundamentally different fabrication method: monolithically integrating microscale laser diodes with high-electron-mobility transistors on a single chip, so each laser is driven individually. If successful, this could produce ultra-high-resolution micro-displays and VLC systems that are impossible with current approaches. The work is applied engineering—it targets specific commercial devices rather than fundamental science—but the integration technique itself could become a platform for future optoelectronic systems.
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Micro-displays with compact screens of <= 1/4 inch diagonal length have wide ranging applications in smart watches, smart phones, augmented reality & virtual reality (AR & VR) devices, Helmet Mounted Displays (HMD), and Head-Up Displays (HUD). Their individual pixel elements typically consist of a large number of microscale visible emitters (which are currently microLEDs). The global micro-display market has been predicted to reach $4.2 billion by 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 100%. However, the significantly increasing demands on microdisplays are pushing the requirements for ultra-high resolution and ultra-high efficiency. Current microdisplays are far from satisfactory, as a number of fundamental challenges cannot be met by any existing technologies. Therefore, a disruptive technology needs to be developed. Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology, in principle offering approximately 300 THz of license free bandwidth that is four orders of magnitude larger than that available in current RF based Wi-Fi or 5G. Considering the highly congested nature of current RF based Wi-Fi, it is expected that VLC would be the leading candidate to offer a complementary solution. Unfortunately, the current approach to the fabrication of VLC is substantially limited to visible LED technologies with conventional electrical driving methods. This approach suffers from a number of insurmountable barriers. Therefore, the performance of current VLC is far below requirements. Global Market Insights has forecasted that the VLC market will exceed $8 billion by 2030. We propose a Centre-to-Centre consortium consisting of ten leading academics from three universities in the UK (Sheffield; Strathclyde; Bath) and two universities in USA (Harvard; Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to develop a novel integration technology in order to achieve the ultimate micro-display systems and the ultimate visible light communication systems. Unlike any existing photonics & electronics fabrication approaches, we propose a completely different approach to monolithically integrate microscale laser diodes (uLDs) and high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) on a single chip, where each uLD is electrically driven by individual HEMTs. This will allow us to achieve devices/systems which are impossible to obtain by any existing approaches.
John Paul Raj David (Co-Investigator)Jon Heffernan (Principal Investigator)Kean Boon Lee (Co-Investigator)Paul Edwards (Co-Investigator)Philip Shields (Co-Investigator)Richard Smith (Co-Investigator)Robert Martin (Co-Investigator)Tao Wang (Principal Investigator)
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