SBIR Phase I: Diamagnetically Directed Self-Assembly of Light Emitting Diodes for Fabricating Large Area, Direct View Displays

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to bring a disruptive Light Emitting Diode (LED) assembly technology closer to commercialization and enable the creation of a transformative, low cost manufacturing platform needed to manufacture future efficient high resolution LED displays as well as other complex integrated electronic systems. This project's success will revolutionize large-area LED array assembly manufacturing, leading to significant improvements in display quality, while achieving large reductions in display energy consumption, just as high efficiency LEDs have dramatically reduced energy consumption in lighting systems. Direct view all-LED displays offer superior viewing quality and high resolution at significant energy savings over current LCD and OLED technologies. There is a huge demand for information displays of increasing higher resolution, but LED display manufacturers face a very high cost in LED packaging. This new LED assembly technology can drastically reduce the LED packaging cost by an order of magnitude for extremely high quality LED displays. This technology can also be extended to the assembly of any other types of small semiconductor die components on large area substrates for systems, such as solar systems, flexible electronics, and distributed networked electronic surfaces. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop and help commercialize a radically new technology for high speed, high precision assembly of small LEDs for manufacturing energy efficient, high performance direct view Light Emitting Diode (LED) displays. This patent-pending technology overcomes the limitations of incumbent pick-and-place technologies and wafer-scale stamping technologies currently in development. This assembly tool is considerably simpler and less expensive, while achieving much higher assembly rates for almost any LED size, pixel pitch and display dimensions. The objective of this project is to demonstrate the commercialization viability of this technology with well characterized baseline processes. A set of process metrics and scaling rules will be established for future product development. This project will result in a prototype assembly system and a LED display demo to demonstrate the value proposition of this technology for the LED display manufacturing industry.