February 15, 2026
Pixels tinier than your patience
LEDs Enter the Nanoscale, But efficiency hurdles challenge the smallest LEDs yet
Tiny LEDs go nano, but they’re dim — commenters: “Where’s my microLED TV?”
TLDR: Researchers built nano-sized LEDs under 100 nm, but they’re inefficient for now. Commenters split between physics nitpicks about light vs. device size and a louder chorus asking, “Cool—so when do we get affordable microLED TVs?”, highlighting hype vs. reality for future VR and displays.
Scientists just shrunk LEDs to the nano world—think 100 nanometers, far smaller than a speck of dust—and the crowd is both dazzled and dubious. A Swedish startup, Polar Light, built blue pyramid LEDs under 500 nm and says they can go smaller. Meanwhile, labs made teeny green OLEDs at 100 nm and perovskite LEDs down to 90 nm, promising wild pixel densities for future VR headsets. But there’s a catch: they’re not very efficient yet. Today’s tiny LEDs convert far fewer electrons into light than regular LEDs, so they’re bright on paper but meh in practice.
That’s where the comments light up. One camp is nitpicking the physics: if the LED is the size of the light’s wavelength, how does that even work? Another camp is like, wake us when there’s a TV. The most-liked vibe: “cool lab trick, but I want a cheap 65-inch microLED set, not a microscope demo.” People joked about pixels “smaller than the drama in this thread,” while others dropped long explainers about why small size complicates light extraction.
Optimists point to Nature Photonics and Nature papers and say efficiency can improve with better materials and fabrication. Skeptics clap back: power the hype down until someone ships a product before 2026. Polar Light says commercial microLEDs could arrive late 2026; the comments are not holding their breath.
Key Points
- •Polar Light Technologies unveiled sub-500 nm prototype blue LEDs using bottom-up hexagonal GaN/InGaN pyramids and targets microLED production in late 2026.
- •ETH Zurich fabricated 100 nm green OLED pixel arrays via electron-beam lithography, reaching up to 100,000 pixels per inch.
- •Zhejiang University produced red and green perovskite LED pixels down to 90 nm, likely the smallest LEDs reported to date.
- •Efficiency drops at nanoscale: perovskite nanoLEDs achieve ~5–10% EQE; nano-OLEDs ~13%; typical millimeter-scale III–V LEDs reach ~50–70%.
- •Researchers expect efficiency gains through process optimization (OLEDs) and material tuning (perovskites).