More colorful and energy efficient LCDs courtesy of quantum-dot technology

A new technology is being developed by QD Vision (the MIT spinout) that will boost the color gamut of LCD televisions by 50 percent and increase their energy-efficiency by 20 percent. The key lies in quantum-dots, otherwise known as light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that can be tuned by changing their size — one nanometer at a time — to emit colors across all spectrums.

The idea is that tuning the dots to red and green while simultaneously energizing them with a backlight will allows the LCD to produce the entire color gamut, whereas standard LCD, which illuminate pixels using a white LED backlight that passes through blue, red, and green filters, yields only 70 to 80 of the national Television Standard Committee’s color gamut. Light is lost whenrver phosphors convert blue light to white.

The technique proposed by QD Vision is called Color IQ and uses a glass tube filled quantum dots tuned to red and green during the synthesis process. Combining this effect with a blue LED in the backlight eliminates the need for conversion phosphors because any blue light that does not shine through is absorbed and re-emitted by the dots as pure red and pure green.

“The value proposition is that you are not changing the display, all you're doing is replacing the light bulb, and yet the entire display looks much better. The colors are much more vivid—known as much more saturated—allowing you to generate a much more believable image,” states QD Vision co-founder and project-lead Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology at MIT, to Phys.org. 

Source: Phys.org