The researchers say the device can also be printed onto flexible substrates instead of glass to cover objects with curves or corners. Rogers has done pioneering work in making flexible electronic circuits and has founded a firm—Semprius, in Durham, N.C.—to commercialize it.

Displays produced from this printing process are highly efficient, says Rogers, who explains that you can achieve the same brightness and image clarity with a lot less material than that used in OLEDs. The 16-by-16 array the team produced has a total surface area of 325 square millimeters. The LEDs together take up less than 1 percent of that real estate, he says. And the LED devices can be made even smaller than the 100-µm-edged version; the techniques the team used are compatible with devices as small as 10 µm on a side.

However, such small LED sizes do not improve picture quality in any way, because the human eye can’t resolve anything smaller than about 100 µm across, says Rogers. ”This is all about making the devices lighter and cheaper,” he says. As a bonus, such displays would be almost completely transparent—and well suited for another automotive need: inexpensive head-up displays.