A Novel Design for Gallium Nitride LEDs Could Lead to Brighter, More Efficient Displays

LEDs made of gallium nitride nanowires are already incredibly compact and efficient—but a new vertical design could take these devices to the next level

Here’s some news to brighten your day: small display screens, like the ones needed for AR, VR, and other head up displays, may soon become way more efficient, and yield unprecedented resolution, thanks to a new kind of transistor made from vertically-oriented gallium nitride nanowires.

GaN microLEDs are more desirable than today’s commercial designs in almost every way. For instance, each pixel on the screen of the iPhone X is created by a collection of organic LEDs, which are much bigger in size than nanowire GaN LEDs, resulting in larger pixel sizes.

What’s more, to control the color of each pixel, commercial devices rely on relatively bulky thin-film transistors (TFTs), whereas GaN LEDs can be designed to produce a color directly—and emit that color at 100 to 1,000 times the brightness and with at least double the efficiency.

The inherent properties of GaN also means that electrons can move up to 1,000 times faster than in silicon TFTs, which allows for much quicker on and off switching.