Building Our Digital Future, One Quantum Dot at a Time
Feb 01, 2022
10 min read
Quantum dots are revolutionizing digital displays in a way never seen before.
Written by Tara Yarlagadda
Illustration by Jorge Peña
From our tablets to our home TVs, Nanosys quantum dots are silently improving the way we experience technology on screens today with miniLED and OLED, and will also enhance future onscreen experiences with products like MicroLED and NanoLED.
Displays serve as windows into our digital lives, which are increasingly important to us. It’s not just about watching Netflix on a brighter TV, but, rather, it’s about creating a memorable experience—from immersive gaming with your friends to evening movie nights with your family.
We’ve already taken a look at pixels—the basic building blocks of displays—and explained the basic types of digital displays. As we dive deeper into the future of digital displays, we need to comprehend how cutting-edge technology will drastically improve their visual clarity, thereby enriching our everyday lives.
To do that, we need to first understand how Nanosys’ quantum dot technology is shaking up the world of digital displays. Nanosys is the world’s leading pioneer in the commercial application of quantum dot technology.
What are Quantum Dots?
Quantum dots are tiny crystals that emit light to create stunning digital displays. These microscopic dots are made of innovative nano semiconductor material technology. They’re typically only a few nanometers in width. By comparison, a single human hair is approximately 80,000–100,000 nanometers wide.
Quantum dots can emit light more brightly and efficiently than any prior technology, which works well for enhancing digital displays. These dots basically absorb all the light photons—the energy from light—and re-emits them at a certain wavelength, which is known as the quantum confinement effect.
But the size of the quantum dot makes a big impact on the color of light being emitted.
“Nanosys is the world’s leading pioneer in the commercial application of quantum dot technology.”
If you shine a high-energy blue light on a quantum dot that is seven nanometers wide, the dot will convert that light to red. If you go a little smaller to five nanometers, the light will be converted to green. Finally, a quantum dot spanning three nanometers will emit a blue light.
Nanosys can create a specifically-sized quantum dot to match a certain peak emission wavelength, meaning they can precisely fine tune the color that reaches your screen. The technology creates pure, intense light that can blend to create the highest-quality colors in comparison to the more basic colors found in a conventional TV display.
In this way, quantum dots are capable of emitting the purest red, green and blue (RGB) light—the colors needed to produce the pixels on our digital displays. By varying the size of the quantum dot in one-nanometer increments, we can produce the sharpest colors possible, enabling consumers to get the greatest value out of their displays.
On the consumer market, you can identify products containing quantum dot technology using labels like QLED, QNED, Quantum, and miniLED. Nanosys quantum dot display products are currently sold by nine out of the top ten TV makers.
Why Are Quantum Dots Necessary for Digital Displays?
Quantum dots are a low-cost way to create perfect colors. Many quantum dot televisions cost under $400, competing with the best in digital display technology at an affordable price.
In essence: quantum dots deliver lifelike color with greater than 90 percent coverage of the BT.2020 UltraHD color gamut standard, which is a technical way of saying they are capable of displaying most of the colors in nature. Most other advanced display technologies can only achieve 70 to 80 percent of BT. 2020, so there’s no comparison when it comes to Nanosys’ technology.
“QDEF delivers awesome color and brightness for a premium visual experience… ”
When you put it that way, the possibilities are endless. Content creators—ranging from game developers to graphic designers to filmmakers—will paint the digital future with quantum dots.
The main three advantages of quantum dots are:
Low cost
Perfect colors and lifelike brightness
Manufacturing breakthrough in printed display
With those advantages in mind, let’s examine the current progress and next steps ahead for this groundbreaking technology.
Step 1: Incorporating Quantum Dot Enhancement Film into Displays—2013 to Present
Right now, Nanosys’ quantum dots are dramatically enhancing transmissive LCD displays.
As a quick recap from our previous article: LCD displays use a backlight to produce blue-emitting LED light, but this technology was limited in its ability to convert blue LED light into high-quality red, green and blue (RGB) colors.
But Nanosys’ technology improves on the LCD backlight by passing its blue LED light through a sheet of the company's proprietary quantum dot enhancement film QDEF™ technology—an optical component containing red and green quantum dots. Nanosys introduced the first commercial application of quantum dots in 2013 with the development of the QDEF technology.
These films are dropped into the backlight of your display, which are then stimulated by blue LEDs and absorbed by quantum dots. This process efficiently converts the blue light into white light, creating the appearance of pure RGB on your screen. That's why quantum dot displays today have perfect color—because it's a perfect light source.
It also produces remarkably bright displays, clocking in at greater than 2,000 candelas per square meter or “nits”—a unit used to measure the brightness of direct view displays. By contrast, older, pre-HDR TVs only reached 100–400 nits. Combined together, brighter displays with pure RGB colors create a truly stunning display on your TV or tablet.
“Content creators . . . will paint the digital future with quantum dots.”
QDEF delivers awesome color and brightness for a premium visual experience at great value for consumers. TVs using QDEF typically cost less than $1000 and can even be found for less than $400.
Every single miniLED TV also uses innovative quantum dot technology. Since 2013, LED backlight LCD technology has become widespread in the television world. This technology places many LED backlights directly behind the display for maximum effect and better brightness. MiniLED TVs simply contain more zones of LEDs lighting up the display.
Finally, Nanosys has also made quantum dots environmentally stable, removing the previous barrier film required to protect quantum dots. Therefore, QDEF is becoming more cost-effective to manufacture and quantum dot technology more accessible to a greater range of consumer products, such as mobile phones.
Step 2: Ramping up Quantum Dots in 2022
While quantum dots are already being put to great use in transmissive (LCD, LED, QLED) technologies, they also have the potential to enhance emissive displays (OLED, microLED) in the near future.
Emissive displays equipped with quantum dot technology have the potential to revolutionize everything from inkjet printers to photolithography patterning.
Quantum dots enhance the performance of emissive displays in three ways:
Greater accuracy in colors
Better brightness for improved HDR performance
Enhanced viewing angles
Coming out of 2021, Nanosys shipped over 50 million units of quantum dot in products on the market, and that trajectory is only expected to grow—with the help of additional innovation in the emissive displays.
“Every single miniLED TV also uses innovative quantum dot technology.”
One of those recent innovations is QD-OLED, which contains a blue OLED backlight that passes through a quantum dot color conversion (QDCC) layer. The QDCC absorbs blue OLED light and converts it to red and green colors, creating a truly epic TV-viewing experience.
Quantum dot color converters improve upon the previous technology by bringing light emission directly to the front of your display. Previously, blue LED light from the LCD backlight had to pass through wasteful color filters to create RGB. But Nanosys’ technology replaces those filters with an efficient Quantum Dot Color Conversion layer, which simplifies the structure of your devices without sacrificing performance.
In effect: the quantum dot color converter emits pure RGB light directly from the front of the display, dramatically improving your viewing experience and increasing the value of the display. QD-OLED displays are arriving in stores later in 2022.
Step 3: Accelerating MicroLED and QD MicroLEDs in 2023 and 2024
MicroLED is fast becoming the future of display technology, and Nanosys is pioneering these displays.
Here’s how it works: MicroLEDs refer to any LEDs that are smaller than 100 microns—one-millionth of a meter—in size. They work just like an LED, but on a much smaller scale, where red, green and blue micro LEDs emit light to your displays.
These microLEDs can also be improved and simplified with Nanosys quantum dot color converters that place red and green quantum dots on top of blue micro LED chips, yielding more cost-effective displays.
Step 4: Paving the Future of Quantum Dots with NanoLED technology in 2025 and Beyond
But the ultimate quantum dot technology is currently being developed as you read this article: NanoLED.
Other applications of quantum dot technology require stimulating the quantum dot with a photon of light, also known as photo luminescence. But NanoLED does something different, instead stimulating the quantum dot with a voltage of electricity—a process known as electro luminescence. The quantum dot absorbs the electricity and emits light.
So, instead of layering in patterns on top of a blue emitter, the quantum dots in this case emit RGB light directly to the display. Effectively, the quantum dots convert electricity to light, improving the visual quality of displays at a low cost.
NanoLED is an exciting avenue to radically improve the manufacturing and quality displays for a couple of reasons.
“NanoLED can also help create long-lasting memories with your loved ones.”
First, it’s very bright—over 600,000 nits in peak brightness.
Second, the technology entails 100 percent solution-processed manufacturing. What does that mean? It means that you can make the NanoLED display without costly vacuum-based measures that require a controlled environment, relying instead on more inexpensive solutions chemistry similar to inkjet printing.
Third, in the future, NanoLED will be so effective it could theoretically turn any surface into an ultra-thin display, whether it’s the faux wood pattern on your desk or the wallpaper decorating your office. Picture reading the daily news on a cheap display at your local coffee shop, which can also be reused and read by other patrons.
In terms of other everyday applications, NanoLED will help create immersive relaxing and enjoyable environments in autonomous or self-driving vehicles. When you turn on self-driving mode, NanoLED can generate displays in the entire interior of the car. If the view out the window isn’t scenic enough, you can instead enjoy a 3d IMAX experience using the vehicle’s NanoLED display.
“NanoLED will . . . theoretically turn any surface into an ultra-thin display.”
NanoLED can also help create long-lasting memories with your loved ones: Imagine walking into a restaurant on your birthday and seeing the walls lit up with photos of your favorite memories from years past. NanoLED technology can make that happen.
As the Metaverse kicks off and virtual reality and augmented reality become a bigger part of our social lives, NanoLED displays will no doubt play a significant role in creating those immersive worlds.
To recap, the potential benefits of NanoLED include:
Low cost
Perfect contrast
High brightness
Ultra-thin, flexible surfaces
Immersive experiences
Explaining the Future of Nanosys and Quantum Dots
So just how is Nanosys championing all this groundbreaking technology?
Nanosys makes most of the world’s quantum dots and is the world’s leading pioneer in this emerging and rapidly growing technology that will help us get the most out of our digital lives.
“With quantum dot technology, the future is looking brighter—literally.”
The number of transmissive LCD display products using quantum dot technology has skyrocketed from a mere handful in 2013 to nearly 300 as of 2021. These displays include tablets, notebooks, computer monitors, and even 98” TVs. More than 50 million units of quantum dots were shipped by the end of 2021, and that number will only grow in 2022.
In the near term, consumers can expect to see even more innovative displays and smart phones using quantum dots and LCDs in the future.
Technology is progressing quickly on the emissive display front as well: the first emissive displays with quantum dots begin shipping in early 2022 and consumers can now purchase them on the market.
Through quantum dots, Nanosys is powering unprecedented visually immersive experiences and paving the future of cost-effective digital displays.
With quantum dot technology, the future is looking brighter—literally.