Quantum-Dot Technology Ready to Improve LCD TVs

If LCD TVs start getting much more colorful — and energy-efficient — in the next few years, it will probably be thanks to MIT spinout QD Vision, a pioneer of quantum-dot television displays.

Quantum dots are light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that can be tuned — by changing their size, nanometer by nanometer — to emit all colors across the visible spectrum. By tuning these dots to red and green, and using a blue backlight to energize them, QD Vision has developed an optical component that can boost the color gamut for LCD televisions by roughly 50 percent, and increase energy-efficiency by around 20 percent.

Last June, Sony used QD Vision’s product, called Color IQ, in millions of its Bravia “Triluminos” televisions, marking the first-ever commercial quantum-dot display. In September, Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL began implementing Color IQ into certain models. These are currently only available in China, “because a lot of growth for the TV market is there,” says Seth Coe-Sullivan PhD ’05, co-founder and chief technology officer of QD Vision, who co-invented the technology at MIT. But within a couple of months, he says, these displays will be “rolling out to the rest of the world.”

Lighting to displays, and back

QD Vision’s technology began at MIT more than a decade ago. Coe-Sullivan, then a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, was working with Bulovic and students of Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor in Chemistry, on implementing quantum dots into electronic devices.

In a study funded by MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Coe-Sullivan, QD Vision co-founder Jonathan Steckel PhD ’06, and others developed a pioneering technique for producing quantum-dot LEDs (QLEDs). To do so, they sandwiched a layer of quantum dots, a few nanometers thick, between two organic thin films. When electrically charged, the dots illuminated a light bulb 25 times more efficiently than traditional devices.

The resulting paper, published in Nature in 2002, became a landmark in the quantum-dot-devices field. “Soon venture capitalists were calling Vladimir, asking if we’d spin a company out,” Coe-Sullivan says. Coe-Sullivan started toying around with the idea of starting a company. Then, a chance encounter at a cocktail party at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship — with a former classmate, QD Vision co-founder Greg Moeller MBA ’02 — sped things along. Early in the evening, the two started discussing Coe-Sullivan’s QLED advancements; they soon found themselves up all night in a lab in Building 13, fleshing out a business strategy.

Following that conversation, Coe-Sullivan enrolled in 15.390 (New Ventures) to further develop a business model. “That’s led to the more rigorous formation of a sales and marketing plans, and product creation,” he says. In 2004 Coe-Sullivan, Bulovic, Moeller, Steckel, and mentor Joe Caruso launched QD Vision.