Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The key features of next-generation display technologies may include high optical efficiency, high spatial resolution, high reliability, energy saving as well as the capability of environment optical sensing. Among them, the real-time optical sensing would not only add new functionalities to the devices, but also enable the displays to actively respond to any changes in surroundings and react accordingly, leading to the realization of a completely new concept - smart display. Nevertheless, none of the commercially-available display technologies has integrated in-situ optical sensing capabilities. The reason is simple, the device top surface area is fully occupied by the two-dimensional heavily-packed light-emitting RGB (red/green/blue) array, leaving no room for any other components. VueReal Technologies Inc. has been collaborating with the PI on the development of micrometer-sized light emitting diode (µ-LED)-based displays. The collaboration yields the demonstration of record-breaking µ-LED-based displays and enables the company to attract more than 18 million dollars investment fund. By significantly shrinking the size of each light-emitting pixel in such µ-LED-based displays, device surface area is freed up, yielding a new degree of freedom to integrate different optical components. Based on the R&D progress in the past three years, the PI and VueReal will continue to work on the development of micrometer-sized photodetector (micro-PD) technologies. The research objectives of this project are 1) To develop a fabrication strategy and an optimized recipe for fabricating microPDs, 2) To characterize the fabricated micro-PD devices, 3) To optimize the performance of the fabricated devices, in particular, to suppress the leakage current and to enhance signal-to-noise ratio and, 4) To develop a detaching and transferring strategy that can integrate micro-PDs with µ-LEDs on a same substrate. This project will provide an excellent opportunity for highly qualified personal (HQP) to gain hands-on experience with device fabrication, characterization, optical detection and display technologies. This project will also provide the much urgently-needed expertise and facilities at the University of Waterloo to the industry partner.