The physical laws of diffraction generally limit the spatial resolution of optical systems to about 200 nm for light in the visible range. In the seminar, I will describe the efforts to overcome this limit taken within the international project Chipscope. The core idea of ChipScope was to use spatially resolved illumination instead of spatially resolved detection for achieving microscopy functionality with superresolution. This was achieved by developing chip-based nanoLED arrays with individual pixel operation and with light emitting diode (LED) dimensions and distances smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

As possible designs two concepts of GaN based  nanoLED arrays (differing in pixel addressing) were studied, namely matrix and directly addressable approach.  I  will discuss the results of optical FDTD simulations e.g. in terms of near field spot size, crosstalk between neighbouring pixels and theoretical resolution limits of various nanoLED arrays. The numerical results are compared with the performance data from a fabricated nano-LED arrays.