 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Nanotechnology Advanced Materials Consumer electronics Displays Quantum dots |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Founder | Larry Bock |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Yuji Akimoto (President and CEO) Dr. Hirokazu Sasaki (COO) |
| Products | Products list
|
Number of employees | 50 |
| Website | www.nanosys-shoei.com |
Nanosys is a nanotechnology company located in Milpitas, California and founded in 2001. The company develops and manufactures quantum dot materials for display products. [1]
On July 28, 2021, Bloomberg reported that Nanosys was in talks to go public via GigInternational1 SPAC. A transaction is set to value the combined entity at about $1 billion. [2] [3]
In May 2023, Dr. Martin Devenney was named chief executive officer. Devenney was the former chief operating officer. [4]
In September 2023, Nanosys was acquired by Shoei Chemical, Inc. [5]
Nanosys Quantum Dot Enhancement Film, or QDEF, is an optical film component for LED driven LCDs. Each sheet of QDEF contains trillions of tiny Quantum Dot Phosphors. QDEF enables LED-backlit LCDs to be brighter and more colorful by providing a high quality, tri-color white light from a standard blue LED light source. Larger than a water molecule, but smaller than a virus, these tiny phosphors convert blue light from a standard Gallium Nitride (GaN) LED into different wavelengths based upon their size. Larger dots emit longer wavelengths (red), while smaller dots emit shorter wavelengths (green). Blending together a mix of dot colors allows Nanosys to precisely engineer a new spectrum of light to customer specifications. [6]
The Quantum Dots are tuned to create better color by changing their size during fabrication to emit light at just the right wavelengths. Traditional light emitting materials such as crystal phosphors have a broad fixed spectrum. Quantum dots can convert light to nearly any color in the visible spectrum, giving display designers the ability to tune and match the spectrum more accurately to color filters while improving energy efficiency.
QDEF was announced on May 17, 2011 at the Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week tradeshow. [7] [8] It has been adopted in products such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7 (2013) [9] and the ASUS Zenbook NX-500 (2014). [10]
At the Consumer Electronics Show 2015 it became known that Nanosys has licensed Samsung Electronics as well as 3M to manufacture QDEF products. QDEFs from 3M are used by top US TV brand Vizio (M-Series Quantum, P-Series Quantum & P-Series Quantum X) as well as TV manufacturers Hisense (ULED TV) and TCL (QLED TV) TV sets. [11]
In 2020, Nanosys announced a supply agreement with Shoei Chemical, a Japan-based producer of nanoparticles, under which the latter became the sole manufacturing partner of QD materials. [12]
Announced just after CES in January 2010 as part of a commercial agreement with Korean consumer electronics manufacturer and LG subsidiary LG Innotek, [13] [14] the quantum rail is a glass capillary optical component containing red and green quantum dots that is inserted between the LEDs and the lightguide panel (LGP) of an LED LCD in manufacturing to improve color gamut.
Nanosys was founded by Larry Bock, Charles Lieber and Paul Alivisatos. They were subsequently joined by Steve Empedocles, Wally Parce and Calvin Chow.
Major funders of the company include Venrock Associates, Samsung, BOE Technology, LG Display, ARCH Venture Partners, Intel, El Dorado Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, Prospect Ventures, Harris & Harris Group, Lux Capital, Applied Materials and Wasatch Advisors. [25]
Nanosys has developed a significant quantum dot patent portfolio with over 650 issued and pending patents worldwide. [1] These patents cover the fundamentals of quantum dot construction as well as component and manufacturing designs. This portfolio is the result of collaborations between Nanosys and universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hebrew University, as well as industry collaborations with companies including Philips-Lumileds and Life Technologies. [1]
Nanosys also led the development of nanowire technology for solar cell, fuel cell, and lithium-ion battery applications, which it spun out in 2013 to a company now known as OneD Battery Sciences. [26]
A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light is determined by the energy required for electrons to cross the band gap of the semiconductor. White light is obtained by using multiple semiconductors or a layer of light-emitting phosphor on the semiconductor device.
A phosphor is a substance that exhibits the phenomenon of luminescence; it emits light when exposed to some type of radiant energy. The term is used both for fluorescent or phosphorescent substances which glow on exposure to ultraviolet or visible light, and cathodoluminescent substances which glow when struck by an electron beam in a cathode-ray tube.
RGB color spaces are additive colorimetric color spaces specifying part of its absolute color space definition using the RGB color model.
A plasma display panel (PDP) is a type of flat-panel display that uses small cells containing plasma: ionized gas that responds to electric fields. Plasma televisions were the first large flat-panel displays to be released to the public.
A flat-panel display (FPD) is an electronic display used to display visual content such as text or images. It is present in consumer, medical, transportation, and industrial equipment.
A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form. When the input information that is supplied has an electrical signal the display is called an electronic display.
A vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) is a display device once commonly used on consumer electronics equipment such as video cassette recorders, car radios, and microwave ovens.
A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image onto a projection screen using a lens system. Video projectors use a very bright ultra-high-performance lamp, Xenon arc lamp, metal halide lamp, LED or solid state blue, RB, RGB or fiber-optic lasers to provide the illumination required to project the image. Most modern projectors can correct any curves, blurriness and other inconsistencies through manual settings.
A backlight is a form of illumination used in liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) that provides illumination from the back or side of a display panel. LCDs do not produce light by themselves, so they need illumination to produce a visible image. Backlights are often used in smartphones, computer monitors, and LCD televisions. They are used in small displays to increase readability in low light conditions such as in wristwatches. Typical sources of light for backlights include light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs).
This is a comparison of various properties of different display technologies.
A blue laser emits electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400 and 500 nanometers, which the human eye sees in the visible spectrum as blue or violet.
Nichia Corporation is a Japanese chemical engineering and manufacturing company headquartered in Anan, Japan with global subsidiaries. It specializes in the manufacturing and distribution of phosphors, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), laser diodes, battery materials, and calcium chloride.
Laser color television, or laser color video display, is a type of television that utilizes two or more individually modulated optical (laser) rays of different colors to produce a combined spot that is scanned and projected across the image plane by a polygon-mirror system or less effectively by optoelectronic means to produce a color-television display. The systems work either by scanning the entire picture a dot at a time and modulating the laser directly at high frequency, much like the electron beams in a cathode ray tube, or by optically spreading and then modulating the laser and scanning a line at a time, the line itself being modulated in much the same way as with digital light processing (DLP).
Large-screen television technology developed rapidly in the late 1990s and 2000s. Prior to the development of thin-screen technologies, rear-projection television was standard for larger displays, and jumbotron, a non-projection video display technology, was used at stadiums and concerts. Various thin-screen technologies are being developed, but only liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display (PDP) and Digital Light Processing (DLP) have been publicly released. Recent technologies like organic light-emitting diode (OLED) as well as not-yet-released technologies like surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) or field emission display (FED) are in development to supersede earlier flat-screen technologies in picture quality.
Interferometric modulator display is a technology used in electronic visual displays that can create various colors via interference of reflected light. The color is selected with an electrically switched light modulator comprising a microscopic cavity that is switched on and off using driver integrated circuits similar to those used to address liquid crystal displays (LCD). An IMOD-based reflective flat panel display includes hundreds of thousands of individual IMOD elements each a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based device.
An LED-backlit LCD is a liquid-crystal display that uses LEDs for backlighting instead of traditional cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlighting. LED-backlit displays use the same TFT LCD technologies as CCFL-backlit LCDs, but offer a variety of advantages over them.
A quantum dot display is a display device that uses quantum dots (QD), semiconductor nanocrystals which can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light. Photo-emissive quantum dot particles are used in LCD backlights or display color filters. Quantum dots are excited by the blue light from the display panel to emit pure basic colors, which reduces light losses and color crosstalk in color filters, improving display brightness and color gamut. Light travels through QD layer film and traditional RGB filters made from color pigments, or through QD filters with red/green QD color converters and blue passthrough. Although the QD color filter technology is primarily used in LED-backlit LCDs, it is applicable to other display technologies which use color filters, such as blue/UV active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) or QNED/MicroLED display panels. LED-backlit LCDs are the main application of photo-emissive quantum dots, though blue organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels with QD color filters are now coming to market.
Nanoco Technologies Ltd. (Nanoco) is a UK-based nanotechnology company that spun out from the University of Manchester in 2001. The company's development has been driven by Dr Nigel Pickett, Nanoco's Chief Technology Officer, whose pioneering work on the patented "molecular seeding" process has formed the basis of Nanoco's unique technology. Since 2004, Nanoco has focussed its research efforts into the development and scale-up of quantum dots and other nanoparticles, including cadmium-free quantum dots. Nanoco's technology has been licensed to Dow, Wah Hong, and Merck, amongst others.
Laser-powered phosphor display (LPD) is a large-format display technology similar to the cathode ray tube (CRT). Prysm, Inc., a video wall designer and manufacturer in Silicon Valley, California, invented and patented the LPD technology. The key components of the LPD technology are its TD2 tiles, its image processor, and its backing frame that supports LPD tile arrays. The company unveiled the LPD in January 2010.
MicroLED, also known as micro-LED, mLED or μLED is an emerging flat-panel display technology consisting of arrays of microscopic LEDs forming the individual pixel elements. Inorganic semiconductor microLED (μLED) technology was first invented in 2000 by the research group of Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin of Texas Tech University while they were at Kansas State University. The first high-resolution and video-capable InGaN microLED microdisplay in VGA format was realized in 2009 by Hongxing Jiang and Jingyu Lin and their colleagues at Texas Tech University and III-N Technology, Inc. via active driving of a microLED array by a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) IC. Compared to widespread LCD technology, microLED displays offer better contrast, response times, and energy efficiency.