Breakthrough: Perovskite LED Outshines OLED, 1000x Brighter!

Imec, a leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, has achieved a significant breakthrough in the field of light emission technology. The company has developed a perovskite LED stack that emits light a thousand times brighter than state-of-the-art OLEDs.

This achievement marks a pivotal milestone towards the development of a perovskite injection laser, which holds great promise for various applications including image projection, environmental sensing, and medical diagnostics.

One of the limitations of OLEDs is their limited maximum brightness. For instance, it can be challenging to read the screen of a smartphone on a sunny day. However, perovskites have emerged as a potential solution due to their excellent optoelectrical properties, low-cost processability, and efficient charge transport.

Despite their ability to withstand high current densities, perovskites have not yet been able to achieve laser operation with the emission of high-intensity coherent light. However, Imec has made significant progress in this area.

"Imec has demonstrated a PeLED architecture with low optical losses and pumped these PeLEDs to current densities that support the stimulated emission of light," explains Professor Paul Heremans, an imec senior fellow and principal investigator of the project. "This novel architecture, which includes transport layers, transparent electrodes, and perovskite as the semiconductor active material, can operate at electrical current densities tens of thousands of times higher (3 kA cm-2) than conventional OLEDs."

Imec's Robert Gehlhaar adds, "With this architecture, imec has enhanced amplified spontaneous emission by incorporating an electrical assist to the conventional optical pumping. As a result, imec has demonstrated that electrical injection contributes 13 percent to the total amount of stimulated emission, bringing us closer to achieving a thin-film injection laser."

This breakthrough by Imec opens up new possibilities for the future of light emission technology. The development of a perovskite injection laser could revolutionize various industries, including electronics, healthcare, and entertainment.