Recently, the Intelligent Photonics team at Beijing Institute of Technology made advancements in quantum-dot microdisplay applications, proposing a full-color conversion Micro-QLED technology pathway, offering new approaches to address key challenges in microdisplay development.
The related results were published under the title “Photolithographic fabrication of high-resolution Micro QLEDs towards color-conversion microdisplay” in Light: Science & Applications.
AR glasses are a crucial hardware component of the metaverse, and microdisplays are their core elements. Current major technology pathways include silicon-based liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), silicon-based organic light-emitting diode microdisplays (Micro-OLEDs), micro gallium nitride light-emitting diodes (Micro-LEDs), and micro quantum-dot light-emitting diodes (Micro-QLEDs).
LCoS is cost-effective but suffers from low contrast and limited response speed; Micro-OLEDs offer high contrast and low power consumption, but their brightness is limited; Micro-LEDs provide high brightness and long lifetime, but full-color fabrication is complex. Micro-QLEDs, in contrast, feature a wide brightness range, easy implementation of high resolution, and full-color display capabilities, making them a promising solution for AR displays.
The research team proposed a full-color conversion Micro-QLED technology pathway, developing a photolithography-template-assisted fabrication process to achieve monochrome Micro-QLED devices with pixel sizes ranging from 2 to 20 μm. These devices consist of blue-light Micro-QLEDs coupled with red and green quantum-dot patterned color conversion layers (QDCCs). The fabrication process includes photolithography template preparation, QLED spin-coating, and quantum-dot patterning.
Experimental results show that the fabricated blue-light Micro-QLEDs exhibit uniform emission, and integration with patterned red and green QDCCs enables full-color display with a maximum resolution of 1184 ppi. The device resolution is influenced by the performance of the photolithography equipment and photoresist materials. It is expected that with advances in photolithography technology, the resolution could be further increased to over 10,000 ppi.
Additionally, the team has achieved a series of research results in blue quantum-dot materials (Nature Synthesis 2023; Nano Research 2024, 2025) and QLED device analysis (Nano Letters 2023; ACS Photonics 2024; J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2023), providing a solid foundation for the advancement of Micro-QLED microdisplay technology.