Apple Expected To Use Quantum Dot Technology In iPhone 6 Display
Apple’s iPhone is still the most popular smartphone in the U.S. market by a substantial margin, but in the fast-evolving mobile communications environment, no one, even Apple, can safely rest on its laurels for long. So after sticking with a major internal (“s”) update of the iPhone 5 that was originally unveiled in late 2012 for its 2013 flagship smartphone, it is widely expected that Apple has something extraordinary in the pipeline for its 6th-generaton iPhone expected to be slated for release later this year.
Apple places a strong emphasis on display quality, epitomized by its “Retina” display technology that debuted on the iPhone, and has been adopted for the iPad tablet and high-end MacBook Pro laptop Macintosh models. However, it is widely speculated that Apple will again kick display quality up to another level with the iPhone 6's panel, incorporating quantum dot nanotechnology as well as likely a substantial increase in screen size and the use of a new touchscreen technology called Sapphire Glass.
Quantum dots are a category of man-made molecules — one of several promising engineering materials niche sectors that recently have emerged from the burgeoning growth field of nanotechnology. So small that you can’t see them with a standard microscope, they’re about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair, and fall into the category of nanocrystals, which also includes quantum rods and nanowires.
Read more about Quantum Dots. (QMC tetrapod info)
At these tiny dimensions, quantum dots behave according to the rules of quantum physics, which describe the behavior of atoms and sub atomic particles, in contrast to classical physics that describes the behavior of bulk materials, or in other words, objects consisting of many atoms. Each quantum dot is actually a tiny non-traditional type of semiconductor, which means it can convert incoming energy. Quantum dots measuring near one billionth of an inch can be used as an enabling material across many industries and claimed to be unparalleled in versatility and flexible in form. The electronic characteristics of quantum dots are determined by their size and shape, which means the color of light given off by a quantum dot can be controlled by just by changing its size. Bigger dots emit longer wavelengths like red, while smaller dots emit shorter wavelengths like green, and so forth.
As a materials subset, quantum dots are characterized by particles fabricated to the smallest of dimensions from only a few atoms and upwards. At these tiny dimensions, they behave according to the rules of quantum physics, which describe the behavior of atoms and sub atomic particles, in contrast to classical physics that describes the behavior of bulk materials, or in other words, objects consisting of many atoms. Quantum dots measure near one billionth of an inch and are a non-traditional type of semiconductor that can be used as an enabling material across many industries and claimed to be unparalleled in versatility and flexible in form.
BusinessInsider’s Kyle Russell reports that Apple has filed four new patent applications with the U.S. Patent & Trade Office related to use of quantum dots in displays. Russell notes that together, “the techniques Apple describes would let its screens not only show colors more accurately, but also show a wider gamut of colors,” and deduces that there’s reason to believe that we’ll see quantum dots in Apple displays this year.
According to a report on Patently Apple, a patent-watcher site a that tracks Apple patents , one of Apple’s new patent applications (20140035960) titled “Backlight Dimming Control for a Display Utilizing Quantum Dots,” says: “The backlight can include an LED (e.g., a blue LED) configured to emit a light through a sheet of quantum dots. The quantum dots can be configured to emit colored light (e.g., red and green light) in response to the light emitted from the LED.”
Forbes’ Haydn Shaughnessy notes that while Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 7 tablet beat Apple to market with use of quantum dot display technology, the Apple implementation will have “a twist” in that It will deliver a much wider color gamut than the Fire, noting that Amazon compromised on color gamut in favor of color reproduction accuracy.
Shaughnessy says that among several reasons for believing that Apple will use Quantum Dot (QD) technology and that the iPhone 6 will be a major coup for Milpitas California based Nanosys inc., a company that holds over 300 patents in QD, and in which Samsung is a major investor.
Nanosys claims that its patented Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) technology represents “a significant step forward in the adoption of quantum dot technology for displays,” by creating a richer, more lifelike color experience while consuming significantly less power (c.35 percent less), and delivering a higher color gamut. The company notes that Quantum dots’ ability to precisely convert and tune a spectrum of light makes them ideal for LCD displays, and they can make all the colors we see on our screens even better by remixing white light into red, green and blue components. They say until now, the white light that LCDs have had to work with wasn’t very good, containing a lot of blue and yellow but not very much red or green. That’s meant displays had to waste a lot of energy to make enough red and green for a bright display while also making for broad primary colors. However they explain that with quantum dots they can design an ideal spectrum of white light for an LCD, one that contains only the red, green and blue that the display needs to make a great image. The precise spectrum created by the dots makes colors pure. And since they’re only making the colors the display needs they require use less power, with the result being is a display that’s brighter, more power efficient and vibrant.
Each sheet of Nanosys’s QDEF product contains trillions of tiny quantum dots tuned to create better color by changing their size during fabrication to emit light at just the right wavelengths. Traditional light emitting materials such as crystal phosphors have a broad fixed spectrum. Quantum dots can actually convert light to nearly any color in the visible spectrum. For the first time, display designers have the ability to tune and match the spectrum more accurately to color filters. This means perfectly accurate color and power-sipping energy efficiency.
Another advantage of QDEF it that it’s designed to be a straightforward replacement for existing film in LCD backlights. Nanosys notes that manufacturers who’ve invested billions in plant and equipment for LCD production can simply slip this sheet into their process to start producing LCD panels with color and efficiency beyond the best OLEDs, at a fraction of the cost.
After speaking with Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove last week, Forbes’ Hayden Shaughnessy got some equivocal answers, making him somewhat skeptical as to how soon the technology will be good to go for smartphone deployment. On the other hand he wonders how it could substantially differ from the iphone 5s other than in display size, and that Mr. Hartlove did affirm that any work Apple is doing in QD display technology will be built on top of Nanosys’ patents. That squares with a report by AppleInsider’s Mikey Campbell noting that Apple’s patent application describes a dichroic filter disposed on a quantum dot-enhanced film (QDEF) in an red/blue/green (RGB) LCD display.Campbell also notes that Apple first filed a quantum dot-enhanced display patent application in 2012.
BusinessInsider’s Russell also notes that Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this month made it clear that screen quality is a major concern for Apple, and cites Cook’s response when asked if he was against a bigger iPhone screen:
“What we’ve said is that until the technology is ready, we don’t want to cross that line. That doesn’t say we’ll never do it. We want to give our customers what’s right in all respects – not just the size but in the resolution, in the clarity, in the contrast, in the reliability. There are many different parameters to measure a display and we care about all those, because we know that’s the window to the software.”
Of course, Apple is notorious for vagueness and obfuscation regarding unreleased products, so Mr. Cook’s statement needs to be read in that context.
Texas-based nanotech firm Quantum Materials Corporation (QMC) maintains that kilogram quantity mass production of quantum dots is a game-changer, and that high quality, high quantity and lowest price quantum dots will accelerate the rate of technological change, with new products cascading into the marketplace as manufacturers learn to integrate higher efficiency/luminescence quantum dots into their products, and predict that his level of change represents a new paradigm that will create new industries, products and jobs in science and industry, with the list of possible quantum dot applications constantly expanding.
According to QMC , public perception that quantum dots mass production and availability is still five to ten years in the future is simply wrong, and the company’s strategy is to use its strengths in quantum dot synthesis and mass production, along with quantum dot printing abilities in creating new product paradigms in industrial and commercial application QMC is using two proprietary disruptive technologies — a novel QD synthesis method licensed from Rice University, and industrial scale production of QD using advanced flow chemistry microreactor technology — to produce highly desirable tetrapod quantum dots at a cost savings of greater than 75% compared to competing suppliers. QMC says tetrapod (4 arms) shaped QD outperform all other QD shapes due to their better abilities in charge transport and multiple exciton generation (MEG).
Quantum Materials manufactures both Cadmium-based and Non-Heavy-Metal (Cadmium-Free) Tetrapod Quantum Dots. Colloidal Tetrapod QD are tetrahedrally symmetric nanocrystals with wurtzite arms exhibiting bright and narrow emission, uniquely capable of dual emissions from one energy source and also singularly unique as micromechanical stress gauges measurable by color shifting of their energy gap when bending under strain.
As to the future of quantum dot technology’s employment in electronic devices, since 1950, “Kasha’s Rule 1,” a principle of photochemistry, held true that if a source of light excited a molecule enough, the molecule would fluoresce in a single color. However, in 2011, the Alivasatos group at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, using tetrapod quantum dots, broke Kasha’s rule by causing them to emit two separate colors instead of just one. This dual emission is possible because the tetrapod’s core and arms can separately emit at different wavelengths, and this discovery finds potential in many new advances in optics and nanobio applications.
Sources:
NanoSys Inc.
BusinessInsider
AppleInsider
Forbes
Quantum Materials Corporation (QMC)
Patently Apple
Wikipedia
