Led by Braveheart Investment Group, the Strathclyde Innovation Fund and the Alpha EIS Fund has invested £150,000 to exploit micro-LED arrays developed at its Institute of Photonics. Scottish Enterprise's Scottish Seed Fund also joined them.

The arrays begin as a single large LED structure. MicroLEDs from 2 to 100µm across have been made.

mLED CEO Dr Jim Bonar pointed out that, "this is a very exciting international area of technology but there are only a few companies in the world which have recognised the opportunity and demonstrated capability in this area. We are producing a platform technology that is compact, robust, reliable and versatile."

According to Institute of Photonics business development manager Simon Andrews,"They are typically 20µm, on 30µm centres, can also be made as dots, doughnuts and strips, operation can be continuous or pulsed down to nanoseconds, and we have control over the emitted wavelength."

Flip-chip bonding to a CMOS chip allows individual LEDs to be controlled, emitting their light backwards through their transparent sapphire substrate.

An initial demo kit includes a 2x2mm 64x64 LED array on a driver board with a USB interface. It is  probably available in mask less lithography and pico-projectors.

A matching array of single-photon avalanche photodiodes (SPADs) can be included on the CMOS driver, allowing the device to both emit and detect.

According to Andrews, these transceiver arrays will initially be aimed at biological research - implementing a technique called fluorescence lifetime imaging where a sample emits photons excited by an earlier flash.