If you thought LEDs were small now, new breakthroughs in planar Nanowire LED production demonstrates that we ain’t seen nothing yet. Normal LEDs are grown through a process of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) where the deposited material adds thickness to the LED, growing vertically from it’s substrate. The new process described by Babak Nikoobakht and Andrew Herzing in the ACS Nano journal is one whereby the deposited material is encouraged to lay down in a “surface-directed” method. The long and short of it is that with more advancements in the horizontal CVD process we may be able to see smaller glowing nanowires of LEDs used in a range of applications. It’s too early to tell whether these nano LEDs will reach the brightness and efficiency of our current crop of high output LEDs but we can only hope.
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