- 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 gonna show you how quantum dots
are made in America in this crazy facility,
what role they're playing in bringing
microLED displays to market, and why ultimately
quantum dots themselves might make
OLED and microLED 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.
(opening jingle)
(rhythmic drumming)
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 filmed 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 confine energy for as long as it can
before letting it escape in the form of colored light.
The color of the light that's injected
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 subpixels.
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 by-product 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 plunged inside the super hot liquid.
Now this reactor is called Corey.
And this one right here is called Shelly.
And that speaks to the multi-step process
the dots go through wherein the first reactor,
the "core" of the quantum dot 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.
Next, the quantum dots are purified
and chemical by-products are removed
before the final step, ligand exchange.
Liquid ligans 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're 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 subpixels 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 subpixel
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 can't wait.
But James, you might say, why would I buy a QD-OLED
When MicroLED 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 Glo, a leader
in the development of MicroLEDs, but I'll be honest,
at first I didn't understand how MicroLED
could benefit from quantum dots since
a MicroLED 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 MicroLED 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 MiniLEDs
can quickly make them non-viable.
Put some quantum dot color converting ink
on those dialogues though, and suddenly
the problem is far more tractable.
As is the manufacturing and cost
of big screen MicroLED TVs.
(electropop music)
Oh my god.
Ahh!
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 display's
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 will be more competition
in display manufacturing with more innovation.
But for now, all the innovation
is happening here in California
at the Nanosys 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 are needed,
Micro Center's expert technicians
can walk you through selecting components,
so 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 the part one to this video, The Future of TVs.
We talk more about Nanosys and backlights and everything,
and all that good stuff in that video.
Check it out.
I think this went really well.
High five.