microled
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Light Polymers
Light Polymers is a Santa Clara nanochemistry company built around lyotropic liquid crystals - water-based materials that can be coated directly onto surfaces to manage light. Its flagship innovation is a direct-coat polarizer that replaces the laminated films used in OLED, MicroLED, and AR/VR displays, aiming for thinner, brighter, lower-cost optics with a simpler supply chain. Founded in 2013, the company runs chemical synthesis and R&D in California and application engineering and manufacturing in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Nanosys
Nanosys is a Silicon Valley materials company, founded in 2001 in Milpitas, California, that makes quantum dots - man-made semiconductor crystals 2 to 8 nanometers across that convert light into precisely tuned, saturated color. Its Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) helped bring wide-color-gamut displays to mass market, and its materials have shipped in more than 70 million televisions, monitors, tablets and phones. Nanosys holds one of the largest quantum dot patent portfolios in the world and is developing NanoLED (QDEL), a self-emissive display technology in which quantum dots make their own light. In September 2023 its quantum dot business was acquired by Japan's Shoei Chemical, which now operates the Nanosys brand and its Milpitas R&D labs.
Avicena Tech
Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.