I-Corps: A New Approach to Silicon/Compound Semiconductor Integration

单片集成LED阵列正在开发中，应用于投影显示行业和其他非显示市场领域，例如扫描、计算摄影和深度分析。 该团队的工艺从化合物半导体LED晶片开始，在该晶片上，单个LED像素被光刻图案化以创建显示器。光仅在显示器需要的地方和时间从每个单独的LED像素产生。有源和无源矩阵版本都在开发中，有源矩阵版本使用激光结晶多晶硅，而无源矩阵版本利用LED中的直接寻址和/或整流。最终计算出的光路效率约为75%，这表示比当前商业系统的效率提高了5- 10倍。减少的部件数量允许更小的总系统尺寸、更小的材料清单以及用于直视和投影微显示器两者的显著降低的系统成本。这种方法增加了亮度，降低了成本，并减少了这类显示器的整体尺寸，消除了在显示器和非显示器市场中主流采用这种系统的障碍。这种系统有可能开发出一种具有现有系统无法提供的功率效率、亮度、成本和形状因子的微型投影仪。除了在显示器中的应用之外，具有这种效率、亮度和形状因子的微型投影仪可以用于许多其他应用，包括深度成像、用于医疗程序的原位引导和计算摄影。该设备的商业化将影响所有这些领域，并实现一系列新的下游应用。 这种方法还将展示使用激光再结晶将化合物半导体与硅进行商业集成的潜力。这种方法也有可能影响目前使用与化合物半导体器件集成的硅背板的一系列其他器件，例如焦平面成像器。这些设备目前主要用于高光谱成像仪，在医疗、军事、地球科学和计量领域有着广泛的应用，该领域的进一步发展也有可能影响这些项目领域。

A monolithically integrated LED array is being developed with applications in the projection display industry and other non-display market areas such as scanning, computational photography, and depth analysis. The team's process begins with a compound semiconductor LED wafer upon which individual LED pixels are lithographically patterned to create a display. Light is generated from each individual LED pixel only where and when needed for the display. Both an active and passive matrix version are under development, the active matrix version uses laser crystallized polycrystalline silicon, whereas the passive matrix version takes advantage of direct addressing and/or rectification in the LEDs. The final calculated light path efficiency is approximately 75%, which represents a 5-10X improvement over the efficiency in current commercial systems. The reduced parts count allows for a smaller total system size, a smaller bill of materials, and a dramatically-decreased system cost for both direct view and projection microdisplays. This approach increases the brightness, decreases the cost, and reduces the overall size of this class of displays, eliminating the obstacles for mainstream adoption of this system in display and non-display markets.This system has the potential to develop a picoprojector with a power efficiency, brightness, cost, and form factor unavailable in incumbent systems. In addition to applications in displays, picoprojectors with this efficiency, brightness, and form factor can be used in a number of other applications including depth imaging, in-situ guidance for medical procedures, and computational photography. Commercialization of this device will impact all of these areas and enable a range of new downstream applications. This approach will also demonstrate the potential for commercial integration of compound semiconductors with silicon using laser recrystallization.This approach also has the potential to impact a range of other devices that currently use silicon backplanes integrated with compound semiconductor devices, such as focal plane imagers. These devices, which are primarily used in hyperspectral imagers today, have a range of applications in the medical, military, earth science, and metrology space and further development in this area has the potential to impact these project areas as well.