The development could speed the deployment of LED-based lighting which, in turn, could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy costs and the world's consumption of oil, gas and nuclear power. At the same time the use of arrays of small LEDs, as is already done in some signage, would allow innovative ways of illuminating rooms, buildings and products.

Using a new patent-pending process that creates "NanoPockets" and other improvements in the semiconductor substrate, Kopin claims to have developed blue LEDs that are as bright as commercial devices but that can driven by a lower voltage. To achieve a 20-milliamp current, and a brightness of 100-millicandela, Kopin's CyberLite blue LEDs require less than 2.9-V compared with the 3.3-V required for commercial LEDs.

"Getting below three volts has been a scientific hurdle for nearly a decade," said John Fan, Kopin's founder and chairman, in a statement. "With further development, we can approach the holy grail of using these solid-state sources for general lighting," he added.

The blue CyberLite LED can be combined with a yellow phosphor coating to create a white LED.

"With CyberLites, we've taken a very important first step in the commercialization of nanotechnology," said Fan. "The next step is achieving mass production. Although this is always the toughest part, as we did with our HBT Transistors and CyberDisplay technologies, we believe we can move CyberLites into large-volume production for the mass market. We have already begun shipping evaluation samples of CyberLites to prospective customers towards this goal."

Much of Kopin's technology development is based on minimizing defects in the semiconductor crystal lattice using proprietary wafer engineering processes. CyberLites are fabricated on gallium nitride compounds grown on aluminum oxide (sapphire) substrates by the same process, organometallic chemical vapor deposition, that Kopin uses for volume production of its heterojunction bipolar transistor wafers. In addition to high brightness and low voltage, CyberLites have achieved electrostatic discharge (ESD) resistance of over 4000-V. High ESD resistance is critical for industrial applications such as automotie electronics, where white LEDs may be deployed as lighting.

"Kopin took the wafer engineering process one step further in creating CyberLites. Realizing that defects cannot be completely eliminated, Kopin provided confinements for production of light away from the defects, and inside these NanoPockets," said Professor Jagdish Narayan of North Carolina State University, a co-author of the Applied Physics Letters paper.