March 2021

Aixtron announced that a US Tier-1 LED producer has selected Aixtron's AIX G5+ C equipment. Aixtron did not provide any more details on this specific deal, but it does say that its new customer is "one of the world's technology leaders in the field of advanced LED technology".

Aixtron says that this AIX G5+ C system uses wafer-level control (based on Auto-Feed Forward) of the film surface temperature during the epitaxial process in combination with Ultraviolet (UV) pyrometry. This warrants, according to Aixtron, a very accurate control of the Indium incorporation into the Multi-Quantum wells (MQW), which will ultimately define the wavelength consistency among all produced wafers.

In 2020 Taiwan's LED developers Epistar and Lextar announced plans to establish a joint holding company, effectively merging the two companies, into Ennostar Incorporation.

During a recent investor conferences, Ennostar's CEO said that Epistar will gradually upgrade its miniLED production line in Taiwan to produce microLED chips. The plan is to reach a yearly capacity of over 400,000 6" microLED wafers. In the long term the company will focus its microLED production in Taiwan, while its Chinese factories will produce miniLEDs.

Taiwan-based STAr Technologies launched a new inspection system for MicroLEDs and mini-LEDs devices. the Unicorn-LAIT is an integrated system with parallel test instrument, probe station and probe cards and can meet mass production needs.

STAr says that its new system enables alignment of up to 6-inch wafers and probe cards for automatic probing test. The parallel test instrument will be based on STAr Taurus-LPX with PMU capable of performing 48 to a maximum of 240 LEDs in parallel. Attributed to the efficient system structure, The STAr Unicorn-LAIT is suitable for the LED industry chip maker and optical devices manufacturer.

Metalgrass has launched a new knowledge hub, QuantumDots-Info.com. Our new site focuses on QuantumDots technologies for the display industry. QDs are already used in many displays, and it is likely that the future will bring us more types of QD Displays, including QDEL, QD-OLEDs and QD-MicroLEDs that use quantum dots to convert blue light to red and green.

QuantumDots-Info brings you daily news, commentary, resources and updates about QDs in the display industry. You can subscribe to our weekly QD display newsletter here - and if you have not done so already, be sure to also subscribe to the free monthly MicroLED newsletter!

In 2019 San'an Optoelectronics announced that it aiming to build a $1.78 billion Mini-LED and Micro-LED production site in Hubei, with plans to start production in March 2021. Later it was reported that the construction is delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the latest news from China, the production is actually progressing well and San'an plans to start trial production by the end of the month. The second stage phase of the construction project is actually starting ahead of schedule - by half a year.

In 2020 Compound Photonics (CP) announced its high-performance IntelliPix microLED microdisplay backplane technology. CP's backplane supports resolutions up to 2048x2048 and a pixel pitch from 1.5 um and up.

Compound Photonics now announced a partnership with specialty foundry GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) to produce the IntelliPix backplanes. CP's devices will be realized on GF’s best-in-class 22FDX specialty semiconductor platform.

Belgium-based microLED microdisplay developer MICLEDI announced that it has raised 7 million Euro from FPIM and KBC Focus Fund. The funds will enable the company to transition from the pilot line technology development to product design and subsequently to the manufacturing phase.

MICLEDI reveals that its next steps will be to demonstrate its native-RGB microLED display on 300 mm wafers, prepare its technology IP for transfer to a foundry partner for manufacturing and launch its product development phase.

Samsung unveiled its TV lineup for 2021 in its Unbox & Discover 2021 event. Included in this new lineup are two new MicroLED TVs aimed for the residential consumer market.

Samsung will start selling its MicroLED TVs by the end of the month (March 2021), with two models - 110-inch and 99-inch in size. In the fall Samsung will release a 88-inch model, and it also revealed that it has a 76-inch model on its future roadmap.