Office of Technology Management at Urbana-Champaign

A new process for creating ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and assembling them into large arrays offers new classes of lighting and display systems with interesting properties, such as see-through construction and mechanical flexibility, that would be impossible to achieve with existing technologies.

Applications for the arrays, which can be printed onto flat or flexible substrates ranging from glass to plastic and rubber, include general illumination, high-resolution home theater displays, wearable health monitors, and biomedical imaging devices.

“Our goal is to marry some of the advantages of inorganic LED technology with the scalability, ease of processing and resolution of organic LEDs,” said John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Rogers and collaborators at the U. of I., Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing describe their work in the Aug. 21 issue of the journal Science.

Compared to organic LEDs, inorganic LEDs are brighter, more robust and longer-lived. Organic LEDs, however, are attractive because they can be formed on flexible substrates, in dense, interconnected arrays. The researchers’ new technology combines features of both.

excerpt from press release courtesy of: 8/20/09 | James E. Kloeppel, Physical Sciences Editor |

This breakthrough has been covered in the popular press, including:

MSNBC.com: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32497606/ns/technology_and_science-green_innovation/

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE57J5IM20090820

Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820161129.htm

Science Now: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/820/3