Televisions and displays are big business, as consumers look to the latest technology to provide ever-sharper, more realistic colors on larger screens. Huge multinational companies like Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense and many others are constantly looking for innovations that will provide their TVs and displays with crucial advantages, whether it is better color, lower power usage or some other edge.
 
There are a host of technologies in the TV market – light emitting diodes (LED), liquid crystal displays (LCD), organic LED (OLED) and plasma are just a few. Quantum dots (QD) are a technology on the rise, with Samsung and Hisense among the TV leaders incorporating QD technology.
 
With more than 300 issued or pending patents, Nanosys, Inc. is a key leader in the QD field. Founded in 2001, Nanosys is noted for its Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) technology, which appears in TVs, monitors, tablets and displays. The company operates the world’s largest quantum dot nanomaterials fab, with manufacturing capacity for more than 25 tons of quantum dot materials annually. Jeff Yurek, director of marketing for Nanosys, noted that the company is enjoying strong sales growth.
 
“Nanosys has been really growing quite a lot over the last few years,” Yurek said. “We were founded in 2001, and it has been a long journey from lab to real commercialization. Our first product, the Kindle Fire AGX, a 7” tablet, hit the market in 2013. Now, just a few years later, there are 88-inch Quantum Dot TVs on the market. It is really an exciting time for quantum dots and Nanosys.”
 
Yurek said that opportunities are plentiful for QD.
 
“Quantum dots are doing fantastically in the display field,” he reported. “On an area basis, looking at the total number of square meters of display area shipped, quantum dot displays are outshipping OLEDs. In that metric, quantum dots are ahead of OLEDs in terms of commercialization. TVs make up two-thirds of the market on an area basis, so it is a logical place for us to focus. Monitors are also a great market, as graphics professionals care about color accuracy. We are seeing a lot of traction from gamers.”
 
Display Week is the largest show dedicated to the industry. The Society for Information Display (SID), the organizer of Display Week, recently awarded the 2017 Display Industry Awards (DIA) Display Component of the Year award to Nanosys for its Hyperion Quantum Dot technology.
 
“This is the second time we received the SID component of the year award,” Yurek noted. “The first time we won the award was for our Quantum Dot Enhancement Film in 2011. This award is especially meaningful for us because it shows that our peers recognize that our technology is very valuable for the industry. The SID community is truly a who’s who of display technology. When you look back over the 50-year history of the organization and see that technologies from LCD to plasma to HDTV were all shown here first, it’s pretty amazing for us to be a part of that conversation.”
 
Yurek said the key to Hyperion Quantum Dot films is that they not require an exemption to the European Union’s Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive, as they combine a cadmium-free red emitter with an ultra-low cadmium green emitter.
 
“Hyperion is unique to Nanosys,” Yurek said. “We make different types of quantum dots. One is based on cadmium selenide, and another is a cadmium-free formulation. In Europe, cadmium is a regulated material, and electronic devices need to have less than 100 parts per million. However, there is an exemption to that rule for quantum dots, because they are such power efficient light emitting devices, and reduce power consumption for displays. That exemption is expected to expire in the next few years.
 
“Purely cadmium-free materials have been unable to match the color of the cadmium-based quantum dots, so we’ve a unique hybrid materials system using our red cadmium-free material and a new green that matches full cadmium selenide performance with less than 100 parts per million,” he added.
 
Ultimately, the key to success for QD and Nanosys is the ability to manufacture the quantum dots. Yurek noted that recent agreements with Hitachi Chemical and Exciton will help in that regard, as mass production volumes are expected to be ready by the second half of 2017.
 
“It’s all about scaling up,” observed Yurek. “Over the last year, we’ve added several new coating partners, including Hitachi Chemical and Exciton, to the supply chain. These partners coat our quantum dots onto the films that are used by display makers to crate Quantum Dot displays. So we have been able to open up a bottleneck in terms of availability to display makers.”
 
Nanosys is also working to develop more cost efficient ways to produce quantum dot TVs and displays, including the possibility of utilizing inkjet printing. Yurek noted that the company is already working with inkjet as well as photolithography.
 
“At SID, we showed a demo of a patterned quantum dot color filter replacement display that brings quantum dot technology to the front of an LCD panel using standard photolithography techniques,” he said. “We call this architecture ‘Photo-Emissive’ quantum dot and it could change the way LCDs are made. Today’s LCDs shine a white light through red, green and blue color filters, to select the colors seen at the front of the display. This is inherently inefficient because the filters waste 2/3 of the light generated in the backlight. By moving the quantum dots to the front of the display and replacing that wasteful passive filter with an active layer of color converting quantum dots, we can improve power efficiency by two to three times. We expect to see devices based on Photo-Emissive quantum dots as soon as next year.”
 
“This is a big step for the industry and, unlike today’s OLEDs, photo-emissive quantum dot displays can be produced in ambient conditions as opposed to in a vacuum. We privately showed similar demonstrations of inkjet printed color filters and look forward to sharing more as we continue to develop these printing technologies.”
 
Yurek sees excellent opportunities ahead for quantum dots.
 
“The next generation of quantum dots are really exciting,” he said. “Our vision is to see quantum dots become the de facto backlight technology for LCD, and there is a very good chance of that happening. You look back at the last big display technology transition – from CCFL-based LCD to LED-based LCD – and the industry switched over fairly quickly due to the obvious benefits of LEDs, such as power efficiency and thinner form factors. We think we’ll see a similar pattern here where the LCD industry will want to move to quantum dot backlights for obvious benefits in color, high dynamic range and power efficiency.
 
“At the same time, we want to drive new technologies forward, such as photo emissive filters and electroluminescent quantum dots,” Yurek added. “We have reached some major milestones there. We announced at SID that we achieved greater than 10% efficiency with cadmium-free blue electroluminescent quantum dots, which is getting very close to blue OLED performance. These new materials could offer process improvements such as printing in ambient conditions, and can be used to create interesting new form factors like flexible displays.”