An MIT materials spinoff company is developing flat-panel displays using nanomaterials to boost their efficiency.
Yvonne Carts-Powell
Flat-panel displays are becoming commonplace in our offices, living rooms, and in portable devices like cell phones. Eighty percent of displays sold today are liquid crystal displays (LCDs). However, QD Vision, a small, two-year-old company based in Watertown, MA, is developing a nanomaterial for a new type of display that it expects to be thinner, more power efficient, and easier to manufacture than LCDs.
Earlier this summer, QD Vision announced that it had made the world’s first display using quantum dots. Quantum dots are nanometer-sized semiconductor crystals that emit light very efficiently. In the small, single-color prototype display, the quantum dots are sandwiched between layers of semiconductors.
QD Vision’s technology grew out of work on organic light emitters in Vladimir Bulovic’s lab at MIT. Graduate students Seth Coe-Sullivan and Jonathan Steckel were working on combining quantum dots with organic materials to make light-emitting devices. Organic materials are promising because they can be made inexpensively, can be deposited on flexible materials such as plastic, and shine brightly. But the researchers realized that they could develop a better device if they combined the benefits of organic materials with the benefits of quantum dots—efficient light-emission, for example.
A cocktail party conversation in 2004 was crucial to the founding of the company. Coe-Sullivan met an acquaintance and entrepreneur, Greg Moeller, at the party at MIT’s Faculty Club, and their conversation included a trip back to the lab where Coe-Sullivan shared space with Steckel. As midnight came and went, they continued talking about the potential of the technology.
For the next six months, Moeller, Coe-Sullivan, Steckel, and Bulovic developed their ideas for commercial applications of the technology and in the process convinced entrepreneur Joe Caruso to join the team. They founded the company in August 2004. In May 2005, Coe-Sullivan received his PhD and the company received $6.15 million in venture capital. Coe-Sullivan is now the chief technology officer with the company, which is developing the basic technology and manufacturing process. The next step is to partner with display-makers to develop products.
QD Vision’s quantum dot technology will have to catch up and compete with organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) that are already on the market and also seek to challenge the dominance of LCDs with thinner displays. OLED displays haven’t taken the market by storm yet, largely because of durability issues: the organic materials degrade when exposed to the environment.
Quantum dots, however, are known for having relatively long lifetimes—certainly longer than most organic materials used in light-emitting devices.
While quantum dots, in principle, are efficient light emitters, “if current cannot be injected efficiently into quantum dot layers, all the expected advantages may not be realized,” says Chennupati Jagadish, head of the semiconductor optoelectronics and nanotechnology group at Australian National University.
The company could solve the current-injection problems by using organic materials, he adds, but then they may run into the same problems confronting OLEDs.
“Quantum dots could inherently have longer lifetimes than OLEDs, says Julie Brown, chief technology officer of Universal Display Corporation, an OLED company in Ewing, NJ. But she’s cautious about whether QD Vision has achieved this yet. “They are doing beautiful research, but I’ve never seen them report lifetime data publicly.”
QD Vision employs about 20 people and is looking to hire more. It is planning to raise another round of funding and expects to showcase its technology at the Society for Information Display meeting next May in California.
Yvonne Carts-Powell is a freelance writer based in Belmont, MA.