The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to reduce the power consumption of display and lighting products by 90%. It will do so by enabling the pervasive use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) in such products. LEDs consume substantially less power than other display/lighting technologies and also offer benefits such as superior picture or lighting quality and longer lifespan. The foremost barrier to the emergence of such products is the difficulty of economically placing large quantities of LEDs onto a product grid. For example, if current-day methods are used to create a full high definition display, its assembly would take about a month and drive its cost far beyond what the market could accept. This project's innovation addresses this problem with a laser-based, ultra-high speed LED placement solution. Beyond this immediate application, it will further the industry's technical capabilities relative to electronics component assembly in general. The commercial potential for chip-based LED display and lighting products is expected to reach about $10 billion within five years. The market for LED placement solutions in support of these products will be about $1 billion in this same time frame.
The proposed project addresses the above problem by demonstrating an ultra-high speed LED placement method that can reduce the one month assembly time in the example above to just one minute. This solution, unlike others in development, increases the placement rate of LEDs by a factor of 10,000 and includes the ability to pre-screen and replace non-functional LEDs. This project will demonstrate the core aspect of this solution involving the placement of multiple, very small LEDs ("microLEDs") using a single laser pulse diffracted into multiple scanned beams. It will use this solution to demonstrate the extremely fast assembly of a quantum dot-based microLED display. The project will build upon a related, previously demonstrated capability applied to larger, silicon dies. Each aspect of the technology (wafer preparation, single laser beam placement, multi-beam placement) will be individually optimized for the new conditions imposed by the smaller sized, sapphire-based microLEDs. This new, LED-tailored capability will then be used to demonstrate the assembly of a four thousand pixel microLED display in under one second thereby achieving the project's goal of demonstrating a >50M units/hour LED placement rate.
