Colorful Quantum-Dot Displays Coming to Market

The nanomaterials give the displays a color and efficiency boost.

Liquid-crystal displays, or LCDs, found in televisions, computers, and cell phones, are very inefficient: their complex optical layers discard over 90 percent of the light they produce internally, some of it because it's not quite the right color. Displays that will be in products made by Korean electronics company LG at the end of the year will have a better color gamut and save battery life by using more of the light that normally gets tossed out.

Quantum color: This prototype display (top) made by Korean company LG is about 4.6 centimeters by 8 centimeters. It has a better color gamut than other LCDs due to the integration of nanomaterials called quantum dots into the display’s backlight. The quantum dots are contained in capillaries (bottom) made by California company Nanosys. Credit: Technology Review (top); Nanosys (bottom)

The displays incorporate nanomaterials called quantum dots that convert light from the backlight into narrowly defined bands of color that are matched to the display's filters. Depending on the design of the display, the addition of quantum dots made by Palo Alto, CA-based company Nanosys improves power efficiency by more than 10 percent and significantly improves the color gamut of the display. LG demonstrated a cell-phone-sized display incorporating the quantum-dot technology last week at the Society for Information Display's annual meeting in Seattle. The company has not yet announced what particular product the quantum-dot backlight will be used in first.

"LCDs are very inefficient, and there has not been much improvement in them over decades," says Paul Semenza, a senior analyst at research firm Display Search. All of the major display manufacturers are working on technologies for improving the efficiency of LCDs, particularly for portable electronics like e-readers and cell phones, where battery life is paramount.

One source of inefficiency in these displays is the backlight itself. Because the optics inside LCDs toss out so much light, the backlight has to be very bright to create a good picture. "You go to the trouble to create white light," says Semenza, "but then you have color filters that block most of it out." Some displays get around this problem by using red, blue, and yellow light-emitting diodes (LEDs) rather than a white fluorescent lightbulb. But this is expensive, and not all LEDs are created equal: blue LEDs are much more efficient at converting electricity into light. Coating blue LEDs with a phosphorescent material that converts some of the light into yellow, red, and green, however, has the same drawback as using a white light source: most of that light is tossed out by the filters.