Research Focus

Flagship Programme: World-class expertise, know-how and full capability to epitaxially ​grow and fabricate III-nitride LED epitaxy and chips

The Centre looks at further development and exploitation of the LED technology. Applications of LEDs extend from domestic, retail, industrial, automotive and street lighting, to more advanced and adaptive artificial lighting. Examples include photo-dynamic therapy, lighting for food storage, mercury-free lighting for clean water purification and surgical theatre lighting. Each of these requires specific operation requirements, custom design of the LED (visible to UV) and device architecture to achieve high efficiency and high performance.

With information displays becoming an essential part of our modern daily life, we envisage more displays to be integrated into our professional and social environment. We will also see fully transparent, flexible and high colour purity displays in the future. To enable next generation energy-saving lighting and information displays, we will continue to develop proprietary manufacturing processes and device solutions.

​LUMINOUS! houses state-of-the-art facilities for semiconductor device epitaxy, fabrication and testing. This includes the showerhead III-N Metal-Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD). The Center provides full capability for the epitaxial growth of III-N for high efficient and high quality solid-state lighting, displays and other optoelectronic applications. It also has a full line for LED fabrication (including laser-lift-off and laser scribing) and material-to-device characterization (including thickness, sheet resistance and photoluminescence mapping, fluorescent lifetime imaging, electroluminescence and LED absolute efficiency measurements with integrating spheres).

High-efficiency and high-quality colloidal optoelectronic material and device platform

At LUMINOUS!, the team studies materials from synthesis to property characterization and device applications with its cutting edge soft-material synthesis, material characterization and device fabrication systems. They enable us to establish world-class expertise and generate new technologies spanning from materials to systems, with the targeted applications in color-enrichment for displays, quality indoor lighting, spectrally enhanced outdoor lighting, flexible and bendable displays, and tunable lasers.

We have developed the capability to synthesize various types of colloidal QDs including II-VI (CdSe, CdTe, etc.) and III-V material systems (InP). The colloidal QDs can be synthesized by using a simple and cheap set-up, setting it apart from epitaxially grown semiconductor QDs which requires expensive instruments.

High standard manual and automatic quantum dot synthesis setups also allow us to explore the unique features of these nano-material systems. Benchmarking and investigating the performance of these hybrid materials and devices are carried out by advanced characterization tools, such as the fluorescent lifetime imaging microscopy, absorption, photoluminescence and quantum yield measurement.