May 2019

In November 2017 we reported that Taiwan's Electronic and Optoelectronic System Research Laboratories (EOSRL, part of ITRI) has launched a project that brings together PlayNitride, LED driver IC designer Macroblock and PCB maker Unimicron with an aim to develop production technologies for high-density Micro-LED displays.

Digitimes today reports that EOSRL has achieved a breakthrough in its mass transfer technology, and is now able to transfer 10,000 micro-LED chips from an sapphire-based epitaxial wafer onto a substrate within an hour. EOSRL demonstrated the process with PCB, Polyimide and glass substrates. Trial production runs will commence in Q4 2019.

Earlier this week China-based Tianma unveiled a new 7.56" 720x480 (114 PPI) transparent Micro-LED display prototype at SID, and the display won SID's people's choice award - the best new display technology.

Tianma today revealed that the Micro-LED prototype was co-developed with Taiwan's PlayNitride. In 2017 PlayNitride started to sample micro-LED panels and shipped samples to 10-20 potential customers. The company's chairman and CEO, Charles Li, said in June 2018 that 5-6 of these customers are continuing the developing of micro-LED modules based on these panels. Apparently TianMa is one of these customers.

Taiwan-based PMOLED display maker RiT Display announced a strategic partnership and share swap with MicroLED developer PlayNitride. RiTDisplay will have access to PlayNitride's technology and will be able to produce and sell micro-LED panels.

According to the Taipei times, RiTDisplay aims to produce small displays for wearable applications. The article says the display size will be around 3-inch, which actually sounds rather large for wearables.

In June 2018, UK-based GaN-on-Si MicroLED developer Plessey Semiconductor and AR developer Vuzix announced a partnership to develop advanced Micro-LED display engines for Vuzix waveguide optics to enable next generation AR Smart Glasses by 2019. Today Plessey announced it has entered into a long-term micro-LED supply agreement with Vuzix.

The new agreement will support the development and production of next-generation AR products that utilize Plessey's micro-LED light source. Vuzix say that the agreement includes an exclusive display device design.

Researchers at CEA-Leti developed a new process to produce high performance GaN Micro-LEDs displays, which the researchers say is simpler and more effective than current approaches.

The first step in the new process is transferring the micro-LED chips directly on top of a CMOS wafer. In the second step each complete "pixel", made from a CMOS driving circuit and micro-LED chips, is transferred to the display substrate.

In 2018, UK-based GaN-on-Si MicroLED developer Plessey Semiconductor announced a strategic partnership with Taiwan's s Jasper Display Corp (JDC). Under the partnership, Plessey will use JDC's silicon backplane to drive its monolithic micro-LED displays.

Today JDC and Plessey demonstrated the world's first GaN-on-Silicon monolithic full-HD (1920x1080) microLED bonded display. Plessey says that it has succeeded in wafer level bonding of its GaN-on-Silicon monolithic microLED wafers with JDC’s eSP70 silicon patented backplane technology, resulting in microLED displays that contain addressable LEDs. The pixel pitch of this display is 8 microns and the JDC backplane provides independent 10-bit single color control of each pixel.

Micro-LED microdisplay developer VueReal will start accepting orders for its first micro-LED display samples by June 2019. The company says that its patented self-aligned technology resulted in a robust and high yield microdisplay production process.

VueReal says that it developed Micro-LED microdisplays that achieve a brightness of 100,000 nits and a density of over 30,000 PPI - breaking its own world record of 6,600 PPI set in 2017.

In October 2018 VueReal announced that it has raised $8.5 million and that it will build an advanced nano technology fabrication center in Waterloo, Canada - which will include an integrated pilot production system that will use the company's proprietary sub-10 micrometer, high-efficiency, solid printing process at commercial volumes.

China-based Tianma announced that it has developed a transparent 7.56" 720x480 (114 PPI) Micro-LED display. The new display, which will be demonstrated at SID next week features a transparency of over 60%.

Tianma says that the new display has an ultra-thin border of less than 0.8 mm (left and right). Tianma says that such durable and long-lasting transparent displays could be very suitable for automotive applications (such as HUDs or in-window displays).

In March 2018, Australia-based RPCVD developer BluGlass announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with a microLED company to investigate the use of its Remote Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition (RPCVD) production technology to produce RGB MicroLED devices.

BluGlass now announced that its partner is X-Celeprint, that used the process to demonstrate a 2,000 cd/m² micro-LED display that offers good luminance with color uniformity, quantum efficiency and forward voltage that equals current high-performance commercial applications. BluGlass reveals that X-Celeprint has been a long-standing customer of BluGlass’ foundry services and were the first adopter of its RPCVD system for Micro-LED production.

The Society of Information Display (SID) revealed its 2019 display industry award winners, and interestingly two out of the three Display Of The Year Awards went to Micro-LED displays.

First up we have Samsung's modular The Wall display, made up of tiled and seamless micro-LED modules. The Wall was unveiled in January 2018 in a 146-inch installation. The Wall was officially launched in June 2018 when Samsung started to accept pre-orders, aiming to find customers in lobbies, museums, galleries, and retail spaces. It is estimated that the price of the 146" model is around $100,000. The Wall Professional features HDR 10+ and a peak brightness of 2,000 nits.