At the recent SID 2025 exhibition, the French research institution CEA-Leti published a paper showcasing its latest achievements in the heterogeneous synergistic integration of gallium nitride Micro LED technology and organic photodetectors (OPD), marking a further improvement in the performance of multifunctional displays that integrate display and sensing functions.
Image source: CEA-Leti
Micro LED technology, with its extremely high brightness and extremely small size, shows great potential in future display applications, and its compact design also leaves room for integrating more functions. Therefore, Micro LED has become an ideal candidate technology for integrating display and sensing functions. However, achieving seamless integration between Micro LED and photodetectors remains a significant technical challenge.
CEA-Leti's latest research has successfully achieved the synergistic integration of Micro LED and photodetector, laying the foundation for multifunctional display applications such as imaging, gesture recognition, and biometric scanning.
A major challenge in integrating Micro LEDs with photodetectors is crosstalk coupling, which means that the light emitted by the Micro LED is received by the photodetector before it reaches the observation scene, causing interference and reducing sensing performance. CEA-Leti's research paper addresses this issue, exploring how the distance between the illumination source and the photodetector affects crosstalk and providing key insights for overcoming this bottleneck.
With further resolution of key challenges, the future synergistic integration of Micro LED and organic photodetectors will enable displays to not only display content but also achieve environmental sensing, intelligent interaction, biometric identification, and real-time health monitoring, all within a compact device.
CEA-Leti revealed that following this breakthrough in collaborative integration technology, the company's next phase of research will focus on the application potential of this technology in specific scenarios, such as physiological parameter tracking. Researchers will also further investigate different types of photodetectors that can be collaboratively integrated with Micro LEDs to optimize performance, reduce crosstalk, and further enhance versatility. (Source: CEA-Leti, compiled)
