“We are working together to improve an area of display performance that has been largely neglected for the last decade,” said Jason Hartlove, President and CEO of Nanosys in a company press release announcing the agreement. “Improving color performance for LCDs with drop-in solutions will bring a stunning new visual experience to the consumer and a competitive advantage to the LCD manufacturer against new display technologies such as OLED. Working together with 3M and utilizing their outstanding design and supply chain capabilities will allow our QDEF technology to be widely deployed across all product segments and will ensure availability to all customers.”
While Nanosys seems to have found an avenue for its technology in the LCD market, what became of its attempts to break into the Light Emitting Diode (LED) biz? Back in 2010 I covered the company's use of quantum dots for use in LEDs and was provided a primer on the technology from its Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Marketing at the time, Victor Hsia:
“Nanosys synthesizes quantum dot phosphor material which is subsequently packaged in a form called a Quantum Rail. For LED backlit displays, our Quantum Rail is inserted between an illuminating strip of blue LEDs and the input edge of the display's lightguide panel. Current LED backlights use conventional white LEDs (which are BLUE LEDs with YAG phosphor) that cannot produce saturated GREEN or RED colors. In contrast Nanosys' Quantum Rail produces a pure white light by using a BLUE LED with Green and Red Quantum Dot phosphors, which results in a tuned white light source that enables over 100 percent NTSC color gamut using the same high volume LCD display manufacturing flow that exists today.”
So, what happened? I have looked for some more information on how the Nanosys technology is being used in LEDs but haven’t turned up much.
Getting back to this recent announcement, it’s an interesting approach that both 3M and Nanosys are taking. They spruce up good old LCD technology so that it can better compete with Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) technology performance. The big question will be whether it can actually deliver on that promise of equal performance at a fraction of the cost and better energy efficiency. We’ll see when a product comes to market.
