July 2020

Last year Taiwan-based LED producer Epistar announced a partnership with China-based LED display maker Leyard Opto-Electronic to setup a Mini-LED and Micro-LED production site in Wuxi, China, in a $142 million investment. Today Digitimes reports that production equipment in Wuxi will be completed by the end of the month, trial production will start in August and mass production will commence in October 2020.

Leyard Opto-Electronic, Epistar's partner, recently unveiled new 2K microLED display modules that can be used individually or combined vertically. The displays come in 40-, 56-, 67- and 81-inch in size. The micro LED chip size is below 100 microns, the pixel pitch is around 0.7 mm in size.

LG Electronics will soon launch its first microLED TV. These are tiled TVs, made from seamlessly connected 640x360 tiles - these are similar TVs to what is available today from Samsung, Sony and Konka.

These new microLED TVs will likely target the commercial market and also ultra-premium residential installations - and will be LG's flagship TVs. LG will be selling these under its business solutions unit, and it seems as if it will start shipping in August 17, 2020.

High-precision 3D sensing developer CyberOptics Corporation announced its financial results for Q2 2020, with $16 million in sales and a net profit of $1.6 million. The company says it is enjoying a "first-mover status" in the microLED inspection and metrology market.

CyberOptics says that at the end of the quarter it received a $2.5 million order for SQ3000 Multi-Function systems for micro LED applications, and additional micro LED-related orders are anticipated during the second half of 2020.

GaN-on-Si IP developer ALLOS Semiconductors announced it is collaborating with with Prof. Ohkawa and his team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to develop high efficiency nitride-based red LEDs on large diameter silicon substrates.

Prof. Ohkawa and team have developed an indium gallium nitride (InGaN)- based red LED stack with low forward voltage of less than 2.5 V and high efficiency by using local strain compensation and a modified MOCVD reactor design. ALLOS and the KAUST team will combine their unique technologies to handle strain and optimize crystal growth conditions for GaN-on-Si and red LEDs. To this end, the KAUST team will grow its red LED stack on top of ALLOS's GaN-on-Si-buffer layers, which will be fine-tuned during the collaboration to optimize the performance of KAUST's red LED stack.

Market research firm Omdia sees a strong growth in the microLED market in the future, led by demand from the smartwatch and TV markets. Omdia says 16 million MicroLED displays will ship in 2027 - over 10 smartwatch displays and 3.3 million TVs.

This is impressive growth, but even with such projected growth microLEDs will have limited penetration in the display market in 2027.

According to reports early in 2020, Samsung Electronics partnered with Epistar and PlayNitride that will enable Samsung to release its first true microLED TVs by the end of 2020. A new report from Korea suggests that Samsung is struggling with technology issues and it is not likely it will meet its goal of a product release in 2020.

The reports suggest that production yields are very low - apparently Epistar is not able to provide Samsung with the millions of microLEDs required to produce its TVs. Another major issues is Samsung's transfer process which is still not accurate enough - with the result being that display assembly yields are painfully low.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada developed a new transfer and bonding method to deposit a flexible microLED array on plastic substrates.

The technique, referred to as a "paste-and-cut", starts with temporarily bonding the LEDs on a process/handle wafer onto a glass substrate (the paste step). The LEDs are then released (cut) to the flexible substrate. This approach allows the LED to be optimized and then combined with other materials.

German-based GaN-on-Si developer ALLOS announced that it has sold its high-power electronics and RF business to AZUR SPACE. ALLOS will now focus its business on the microLED display market.

ALLOS Semiconductors developed its GaN-on-Si epiwafer technology for both high power electronics and Micro LED applications, but the time has come to focus on one market. The company says its 200 and 300 mm epiwafer technology is crucial in meeting the uniformity, crystal quality and manufacturability requirements of the novel Micro LED display applications.