Quantum dots market grows big

Nature News : Nanocrystals called quantum dots have promised to revolutionize display technologies, solar power and biological imaging for more than a decade. Yet the quantum-dot market has remained small, with a handful of companies selling dots directly to researchers, using the particles to develop their own products or licensing their technologies to partners."Quantum dots have been around for quite a while, but they’re taking a really long time to mature,” says David Hwang of the market-analysis company Lux Research in New York. A key barrier is price: quantum dots can cost anywhere from US$3,000 to $10,000 per gram, restricting their use to highly specialized applications.But industry analysts are now predicting extremely rapid growth for the market over the next few years, driven by demand for energy-efficient displays and lighting, and enabled by cheaper, more efficient manufacturing processes. In September 2008, market-research company BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts, predicted that the market for products relying on quantum dots would grow from $28.6 million in 2008 to $721 million by 2013, with particularly rapid growth in the optoelectronics sector from 2010.