Breakthrough MicroLED Development Delivers Improved Emission Directionality and Efficiency

A collaboration between Lumileds and Eindhoven University of Technology has produced a technology breakthrough that employs metasurfaces integrated at the chip level to significantly improve MicroLED emission directionality and enhance MicroLED efficiency. This technology holds promise for a wide range of LED applications. This breakthrough offers the potential for much greater MicroLED display luminance and significantly more effective optical coupling for applications such as augmented reality or data communication applications This pioneering work is published in the April 6 issue of Nature Communications Engineering.

Researchers embedded a metasurface consisting of nano-sized disks within the p-contact layer of MicroLEDs and stimulated collective resonances with emitting dipoles in the active region. The enhanced light outcoupling and radiative recombination led to notable improvements in LED efficiency. Additionally, the design of the nanostructure lattice was tailored to manipulate the far-field emission pattern of the LED. The team successfully showed that on-axis candela can be doubled for comparable LED output.

Lumileds is part of a multi-year partnership with Professor Jaime Gomez Rivas’ team at TU Eindhoven. This breakthrough demonstrates how narrowing the emission angle of LEDs can be achieved while also boosting efficiency and is just one of the beneficial results of this collaboration.