Recent Advances in Flexible Inorganic Light Emitting Diodes: From Materials Design to Integrated Optoelectronic Platforms

The emergence of high-performance materials for flexible inorganic light emitting diodes (ILEDs) provides the foundations for a broad range of compelling, unconventional systems, from deformable displays and lighting sources to wearable and implantable bioelectronics with diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities. Interdisciplinary progress in materials synthetic methods, device designs, mechanical layouts, and assembly techniques over the past decade enables flexible ILEDs with remarkable operating characteristics even under extreme modes of mechanical deformation. This review summarizes recent advances in this field, with emphasis on the unique properties of the underlying materials and device physics in the first several sections. The subsequent content highlights examples of system-level integration of flexible ILEDs into advanced optoelectronic platforms with characteristics that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with conventional approaches. Miniaturized, implantable biomedical tools for optical modulation of neural activity at target sites and conformable, skin-mounted electronics for sensing and visualization of physiological parameters in real time provide examples of some of the most recent directions.