February 2018

SID's DisplayWeek is the world's leading display conference, and the MicroLED-Info team will attend this year's event, which will take place in Los Angeles in May 20-25. The trade show brings together a large part of the display industry, and we're looking forward to seeing new MicroLED technologies, products and demonstrators and meeting up with industry leaders!

DisplayWeek includes a 3-day exhibition, 4-day technical symposium, short courses, seminars and three focus conferences (business, investors and market-focus). We'll be happy to schedule meetings - so if you plan to come to the event, do contact us. We're really looking forward to a week full of display technologies!

Following Samsung's unveiling of its 146" Micro-LED TV prototype, LG Display's CEO said in early 2018 that the company is also developing large-area Micro-LED technologies.

Samsung 146-inch Wall TV

According to Business Korea, LG Display aims to unveil its first Micro-LED TV in September (based on LG Innotek's Micro-LEDs). LGD's TV will be larger than Samsung's 146" Wall.

Samsung Electronics says it will push forward with its two-track strategy for the premium TV market - utilizing both quantum-dots enhanced LCDs (QLEDs) and Micro-LED TVs. Samsung Visual Display Business VP, Han Jong-hee, says that Samsung will start selling its Wall Micro-LED TV in August 2018.

Samsung demonstrated its Micro-LED "The Wall" display again at ISE 2018 earlier this month. Thank you Dotan from AVMaster.co.il for the video.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo developed a new "electronic skin" - which is a breathable, ultra-thin flexible display that includes an on-skin electrode sensor, a wireless communication module and a 16 x 24 array of micro LEDs.

Such a device could be used to monitor health via vita sign reading, and transmit the information wireless to a smartphone.

Researchers from Korea's KAIST developed flexible vertical micro-LEDs (f-VLEDs) using anisotropic conductive film (ACF)-based transfer and interconnection technology.

The researchers developed their own transfer equipment and used it to fabricate a 50x50 array of f-VLEDs using simultaneous transfer and interconnection through the precise alignment of ACF bonding process. The researchers report that the micro-LEDs achieved an optical power density of 30 mW/mm2 - which is three times higher than that of lateral micro LEDs. The LEDs offer improving thermal reliability and lifetime by reducing heat generation within the thin film LEDs.

Sony demonstrated two of its Micro-LED Crystal-LED "CLEDIS" integrated displays at ISE 2018. Sony's main displays at ISE was a large 8K x 2K Crystal-LED display, that reportedly was very impressive. Sony also demonstrated a small "Baby" Crystal-LED display, about 120-inch in size, at its booth.

According to Sony employees at the booth, the large CLEDIS took around 50 hours to build, and the cost of such a display is around $1.8 million. The smaller CLEDIS at around 120" will cost bout $500,000. I wish to thank Omar Ayers for providing the photos and the information from ISE.

LEDsInside reports that Samsung and China's largest LED producer San'an Optoelectronics signed a long-term agreement to co-develop Micro-LED displays. Under the agreement, Samsung pre-paid San'an $16.83 million to secure micro-LED chips.

San'an says that following its Micro-LED development completion, it aims to become Samsung's major chip supplier. It is estimated that it will take San'an three years to achieve mico-LED mass production, but apparently it will supply Samsung with such chips throughout the next three years (maybe using a lower-volume production method).

France-based 3D GaN LED developer Aledia announced its Series-C Financing round, totaling $36 million. Its existing investors participated in this round, and Aledia also announced that Intel Capital has joined as a new investor.

Aledia also says that it is developing next-generation Micro-LED displays with several large industrial partners. Aledia is developing both mobile displays (for smartphones, tablets, etc) and micro displays for AR/VR applications.

UK-based Seren Photonics has successfully completed the first tranche of a £1 million investment round with funding from existing and new investors. Seren says that these funds will be used to continue the manufacturing scale-up of its template technology along with the further development of green LED epitaxy structures.

Seren develops a suite of long wavelength LED epitaxy on its novel semipolar GaN aimed at delivering higher efficiency and more color stable green, yellow and red devices. Seren says that its Semipolar enabled LEDs overcome shortcomings of green LEDs manufactured on polar GaN, mainly low wall plug efficiency and poor poor wavelength stability over a range of current densities.

Yole Developpement published an interesting article discussing the patent landscape of the MicroLED industry. As of today, almost 1,500 MicroLED patents were filed by 125 companies and organization. The overall corpus has an average of 3.2 years, which makes these patents quite new.

The initial micro-LED patents, filed at around 2000-2001, were mostly by a variety of research institutes, by large companies such as Sony and Sharp but also by startups such as Luxvue (acquired by Apple). The activity in this field is still led mostly by startups, and with the exception of Sony and Sharp, mature display makers are relative latecomers.