Researchers build the Smallest LED

A research team from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) claim to have built the "world's smallest LED" — and say the technology could be used to turn smartphone cameras into high-resolution microscopes in the future.

The silicon LED created by the team is definitely tiny — smaller even, interestingly, than the wavelength of the light it emits. Despite this, its light intensity is equivalent to much larger silicon LEDs — and it's powerful enough to drive a prototype holographic microscope, which forms the base of the team's claims to be able to convert smartphone cameras into microscopes through integration of the LEDs at a silicon level.

To actually make the microscope — stand-alone or built into a smartphone — work, though, requires some clever software. In this case, that software is a deep neural network algorithm which is able to turn measurements made by what the team calls a holographic microscope into reconstructed objects.