The results are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The perovskites that were used to make the LEDs are known as organometal halide perovskites, and contain a mixture of lead, carbon-based ions and halogen ions known as halides. The materials dissolve well in common solvents, and assemble to form perovskite crystals when dried, making them cheap and simple to make.
“These organometal halide perovskites are remarkable semiconductors,” said Zhi-Kuang Tan, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the paper’s lead author. “We have designed the diode structure to confine electrical charges into a very thin layer of the perovskite, which sets up conditions for the electron-hole capture process to produce light emission.”
The perovskite LEDs are made using a simple and scalable process in which a perovskite solution is prepared and spin-coated onto the substrate. The process does not require high temperature heating steps or a high vacuum, and is therefore cheap to manufacture in a large scale. In contrast, conventional methods for manufacturing LEDs make the cost prohibitive for many large-area display applications.
“The big surprise to the semiconductor community is to find that such simple process methods still produce very clean semiconductor properties, without the need for the complex purification procedures required for traditional semiconductors such as silicon,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend of the Cavendish Laboratory, who has led this programme in Cambridge.
“It is remarkable that this material can be easily tuned to emit light in a variety of colours, which makes it extremely useful for colour displays, lighting and optical communication applications,” said Tan. “This technology could provide a lot of value to the ever growing flat-panel display industry.”
The team says that the first commercially-available LED based on perovskite could be available within five years.
Source: http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/en/could-perovskite-discovery-lead-to-cheaper-led-displays.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222921983&vID=209
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