 Did you know that part of your gaming monitor or big screen TV was actually grown in a vat? It looks like a microbrewery, but this is actually a chemical reactor creating quantum dots. The tech that's not only responsible for raising the color accuracy bar in millions of displays, but also the key technology behind Samsung's still unreleased QD OLED displays. The new best display you can get. Today I'm going to show you how quantum dots are made in America in this crazy facility, what role they're playing in bringing micro LED displays to market and why ultimately quantum dots themselves might make OLED and micro led displays obsolete. As for who, our sponsor, Crucial, get more done with Crucial's P5 Plus NVMe SSD with up to 6,600 megabytes per second sequential reads and a five star warranty. Crucial makes tech to last. Get yours today at the link below. Whether it's a monitor or an LCD TV, you may be watching this video on a display with quantum dot enhancement film. That's the term that NanoSys, the company responsible for every quantum dot product that's ever been brought to market, gives to this. The polymer film containing red and green quantum dots that's placed among the myriad film filters and diffusers that manipulate light on its way to your eye. But what about these quantum dots is quantum exactly? Are they just super small? Actually it has to do with the principle by which they operate. Quantum confinement. Each quantum dot is a molecule that will trap or confined energy for as long as it can before letting you escape in the form of colored light. The color of the light that's ejected by the quantum dot is precisely related to its size. Give the energy a lot of room to tire itself out and it'll emit a low frequency light like red. Give it less runway and it'll emit a higher energy green light. Mixing a solution of red and green quantum dots along with a clear polymer creates these sheets which have made the HDR content we love far more stunning and color accurate. They take the wide band of colors that comprise the white light of a typical LCD backlight and isolate just the true red and true green light, discarding the adjacent unwanted colors like orange and lime and other colors that aren't even fruits. What comes out from the other side of this film then is a new white light made with cleaner ingredients that the LCD can then pixelate with its RGB sub pixels. It smells like hot oil in here. The great thing about quantum dots is that you can change their size and therefore the color they emit super incrementally. One nanometer steps and this is done simply by changing the temperature that they're cooking at. For example, the blue quantum dot crystal is only 100 atoms and in a barrel of blue quantum dot material that NanoSys ships to its customers, folks like Samsung Display and BOE, every quantum dot in that 16 gallon barrel has to be 100 atoms. This seemingly impossible feat is accomplished through chemical self assembly which is automated with this badass industrial equipment and this badass industrial software. It's basically a chemical reaction where each atom is deposited into its crystal site by another chemical which becomes a byproduct that's later discarded. The chemical reaction is endothermic which means it requires energy so they just heat the reactor. Because the outside of this reactor is made with a material similar to the heat shields NASA uses, we can't see what's going on inside but we can see the wavelength emitted by the growing crystals because of an optical probe that's punched inside the super hot liquid. Now this reactor is called Cori and this one right here is called Shelley and that speaks to the multi-step process the dots go through where in the first reactor the core of the quantum dot is created and then later a shell is grown around it. This helps eliminate defects that exist on the core which is important because a defective quantum dot won't eject its energy creating excess heat that could degrade or yellow the enhancement film surrounding it. Once the quantum dots are purified and chemical byproducts are removed before the final step, ligand exchange. The liquid ligands that are cured by UV light to form a solid structure in a quantum dot enhancement film may require different properties than say the ligands used in quantum dot ink that needs to shoot out of an inkjet printer head. That's right, ink. The next-gen quantum dot displays hitting the market in 2022 are not LCDs with enhancement film. They are OLED displays with quantum dots printed directly onto the OLED emitters and here's why that's a really big deal. Current big screen OLEDs are technically W OLEDs and LG makes them all. The emitters are red, blue, and green mixed together to create white. The sub pixels use color filters to split that white light back out because the colors aren't very pure and the voltage required to drive the organic emitters to high brightness is damaging to them. We're talking burn-in and short lifespan. That's why there's a fourth clear sub pixel that just shines white light through. These next-gen OLEDs though, which Samsung calls QD OLEDs, don't need a white pixel in order to get high brightness. They use only blue emitters and they shine them through red and green quantum dot ink for color conversion, not filtering. Now we haven't seen a finished product yet. Get subscribed for when we do. But these displays should be brighter, longer lasting, and have better viewing angles than anything we've seen so far. Super exciting stuff. I just can't wait. But James, you might say, why would I buy a QD OLED when micro led is right around the corner? Is NanoSys putting its eggs in the wrong basket? Actually, they're in every basket. In early 2021, NanoSys acquired Glow, a leader in the development of micro LEDs. But I'll be honest, at first, I didn't understand how micro led could benefit from quantum dots since a micro led display should already have tiny R, G, and B LEDs that it turns on and off at will. And they do. But have you ever wondered why the micro led TVs that are available today are so huge? It's because the pixels are so big and they have to be big because of the D in LED, the diode. At the center of a pixel, the diode can efficiently create, say, blue. But at the edges of a pixel, where the material has been snipped off in order to conform to the pixel shape, the diode gets a lot less efficient and in some cases won't emit any light at all. But it will produce heat, reducing durability. This isn't a big deal if the pixels are large since there's more juicy emitting area compared to the edge area. But that ratio changes as the pixels get smaller. Red and green are particularly affected by this issue. So if you're talking about a very small display, like in a pair of glasses where you need it to be super battery efficient while also having a really, really bright display so you can see everything on a sunny day. Well, the limits of many LEDs can quickly make them non viable. Put some quantum dot color converting ink on those diodes, though, and suddenly the problem is far more tractable, as is the manufacturing and cost of big screen micro led TVs. Oh my God. How do you do this? Cool. I got one. Yeah. And finally, there's the long game. Quantum dots that are not charged by shining a light on them, but instead are directly connected to the displays thin film transistors, replacing LEDs. And yeah, I'm sure the performance would be awesome, but the real disruption from these devices would be in the cost and the manufacturing. Right now, virtually all commercially available OLEDs are created using evaporatively deposited materials in a giant grossly expensive vacuum chamber. The limitations of these chambers is why TVs come in the sizes that they do. It's why the mother glass they're cut from is the size it is. And it's why display manufacturing has been a state sponsored enterprise up until this point. First in Japan, then Korea and now China. But once a flagship display manufacturing plant can be made for 10% of the cost, private equity can build a fab and oddly shaped display panels for say German cars can be produced in Germany. Supply chains will be less susceptible to major disruption like they are right now. And there'll be more competition in display manufacturing with more innovation. But for now, then all the innovation is happening here in California at the nano sys research and manufacturing facility. So huge thanks to these guys for letting us in behind the curtain and big thanks to our sponsor Micro Center Micro Center has partnered with ASUS to offer a new easy to use online PC builder tool. The tool helps customers build their own computer with three different base starting points, value performance and ultimate each base system includes a case with a pre installed motherboard, power supply and separately packaged graphics card. You can add in your choice of CPU between AMD and Intel as well as your preference of RAM storage and OS. The parts can be arranged for same day in store pickup or for an added build fee Micro Center will assemble the computer for you. If you're unsure of what parts you need Micro Center's expert technicians can walk you through selecting components or check out Micro Center's new PC builder and receive a free 240 gigabyte SSD if you're a new customer at the links below. If you're looking for something else to watch check out kind of the part one to this video the future of TVs we talked more about nano sys and backlights and everything and all that good stuff in that video check it out. I think this went really well high five.