Tiny OLED Pixels to Be Made Like Microchips Soon

While screens are becoming increasingly sharper, shrinking them for use in augmented reality glasses, camera viewfinders or other applications is limited because conventional light-emitting diode crystals become dimmer the smaller they are cut.

RMIT University computational chemist Dr Andrew Christofferson said organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, could provide the way forward because they continue to shine bright even as tiny pixels. But they do have another limitation.

"The problem is that OLEDs have not been suitable for high-precision manufacturing because the solvents and other chemicals used in the semiconductor industry attack and degrade the organic molecules," he said.

But now an international team led by ETH Zurich have succeeded in making OLED molecules suitable for manufacture at tiny scales using light, the way silicon computer chips are made, and able to survive the process.

They have published their findings in the journal Nature .