Researchers develop fibre-like light-emitting diodes for wearable displays
Researchers in South Korea have developed fibre-like light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) which are flexible enough to be used in wearable displays, unlike traditional wearable displays which are rigid, limiting their applications.
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South Korean researchers have developed fibre-like light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that can be used to create flexible wearable displays.Traditional wearable displays are manufactured on a hard substrate, which is later attached to the surface of clothes. This technique has limited applications for wearable displays because they are inflexible and ignore the characteristics of fabric.Professor Kyung-Cheol Choi and his research team from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST, South Korea, focused on fibres, a component of fabrics, and developed a fibre-like LED that shared the characteristics of both fabrics and displays.The essence of this technology, the dip-coating process, is to immerse and extract a three dimensional (3-D) rod (a polyethylene terephthalate fibre) from a solution, which functions like thread. Then, the regular levels of organic materials are formed as layers on the thread.The dip-coating process allows the layers of organic materials to be easily created on the fibres with a 3-D cylindrical structure, which had been difficult in existing processes such as heat-coating process.By controlling the withdrawal rate of the fibre, the coating's thickness can also be adjusted to the hundreds of thousandths of a nanometre.The researchers said that this technology would accelerate the commercialisation of fibre-based wearable displays because it offers low-cost mass production using roll-to-roll processing, a technology applied to create electronic devices on a roll of flexible plastics or metal foils.The results of the work were published in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials.