Associate Professor Keith Gordon
LCD or liquid crystal display, the common technology behind many small digital screens, is already being replaced by OLEDs - organic light emitting diodes. However, Associate Professor Keith Gordon and his team are busy developing a new way of making those displays.
"The big deal with OLEDs is that they don't use much energy," he explains. "An LCD screen needs backlighting and then it basically blocks light to create the picture.
The problem there is that blocking light to make a picture is less efficient than having each pixel emit light to make the picture.
"Also, an OLED has a much simpler architecture whereas every pixel in an LCD screen has 19 components, so it is more complex and, therefore, more expensive to make."
Gordon is looking to take a further leap forward by making an even more efficient OLED.
While they are currently made using a structure of up to seven layers, he and his team are developing a much simpler single-molecule structure.
Links have been forged with industry partners in both New Zealand and Korea, and the problem of self-organising OLEDs in a device is also being researched.
Once they have perfected their tiny but bright molecules you can expect to see these new generation OLEDs coming to a small screen near you.
FUNDING
Marsden Fund
Foundation for Research, Science and Technology
MacDiarmid Institute