The University of Strathclyde has spun out a company to exploit micro-LED arrays developed at its Institute of Photonics.
mLED, as it will be known, has kicked off with a £150,000 round led by Braveheart Investment Group, investing via both the Strathclyde Innovation Fund and the Alpha EIS Fund.
Scottish Enterprise's Scottish Seed Fund also participated.
"This is a very exciting international area of technology but there are only a few companies in the world which have recognised the opportunity and demonstrated capability in this area," said mLED CEO Dr Jim Bonar. "We are producing a platform technology that is compact, robust, reliable and versatile."
The arrays start off as a single large LED structure, which is divided into multiple emitters by a series of shallow trenches.
MicroLEDs from 2 to 100µm across have been made.
"They are typically 20µm, on 30µm centres," Institute of Photonics business development manager Simon Andrews told Electronics Weekly. "They can also be made as dots, doughnuts and strips, operation can be continuous or pulsed down to nanoseconds, and we have control over the emitted wavelength."
Flip-chip bonding to a CMOS chip allows individual LEDs to be controlled, emitting their light backwards through their transparent sapphire substrate.
An initial demo kit includes a 2x2mm 64x64 LED array on a driver board with a USB interface.
"There is interest already. We want to hear from people with interesting applications," said Andrews.
One possible use is mask less lithography.
Another is pico-projectors, although Andrews said this market would be too expensive to address for the time being.
A matching array of single-photon avalanche photodiodes (SPADs) can be included on the CMOS driver, allowing the device to both emit and detect.
According to Andrews, these transceiver arrays will initially be aimed at biological research - implementing a technique called fluorescence lifetime imaging where a sample emits photons excited by an earlier flash.
The Institute of Photonics is a partner in the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance
From the left: mLED CEO Dr Jim Bonar, and technology developers Professor Martin Dawson and Dr Erdan Gu, both of the Strathclyde Institute of Photonics and consultants to mLED.