Automotive - Page 6

Digitimes reports that PlayNitride raised $50 million and is ready to start trial production of micro-LED chips by the end of August 2019. PlayNitride will increase its headcount by 100 employees.

PlayNitride told Digitimes that it achieved a yield rate of 99.9% in its LED transfer (pick-and-place) process. Using mass repair technologies, the company is certain it can achieve commercial viability of its process. The company's mass transfer speed is 10,000 chips per second. This means that for a Full-HD (1920x1080) display it will take just over 10 minutes to transfer the LED chips. A 4K display will take just over 40 minutes.

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.

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).

The Germany Bavarian state ministry for regional development has funded a new three-year project to develop transparent micro-LED displays for automotive applications.

The SmartVIZ project consortium consists of Osram, Fraunhofer IISB and ASM Amicra. The partners aim to develop direct-view high-resolution transparent and demonstrate a prototype in October 2021.

n-tech Research says that the Micro-LED lighting will experience very fast growth, with revenues exceeding $1.4 billion by 2028 with 170 million lighting units shipped.

n-tech says that some industry analysts say that micro-LED lighting will always remain a tiny niche and only cater for novelty lighting. n-tech, however, sees several advantages of micro-LEDs compared to conventional HB LEDs and expect that these will be enough to earn micro-LEDs a healthy share of the LED lighting market.

US-based Rohinni announced a new joint venture with China-based display maker BOE. The new JV (which will be based in China and controlled by BOE) will develop LCD mini-LED and micro-LED backlighting units.

The JV will adopt Rohinni's proprietary high-speed MicroLED placement technology that is capable of placing 50 die-per-second (dps) with 10 micron accuracy at 99.999% die yields. BOE and Rohinni will initially focus on large panel applications (32-inch and up) for consumer electronic products in addition to all display sizes for industrial, automotive and other markets

In September 2018 we reported that China-based San'an Optoelectronics is gearing up to setup its first micro-LED epitaxial wafer and chip production line in Q1 2019.

According to Digitimes, San'an now plans to start sampling Micro LED chips as early as January 2019. San'an says that micro-LEDs are not mature yet, but early trial adoption will begin in the second half of 2019 - for movie theaters, TVs and automotive displays.

According to Digitimes, China-based Sa'nan Optoelectronics is gearing up to setup its first micro-LED epitaxial wafer and chip production line in Q1 2019. San'an developed 20-micron micro-LEDs, and the company is now aiming to develop 4-micron LEDs and 10-micro LED flip-chips.

According to the report, San'an aims to start small-volume micro-LED production to be used for wearables, automotive taillights and large-area displays. The company's green and blue micro-LEDs are ready for commercialization, but its red chips still require development.

US-based Rohinni announced a new joint-venture with Magna Electronics to develop flexible mini-LED and micro-LED based lighting devices for the automotive market.

The new JV, controlled by Magna Electronics will be called Magna Rohinni Automotive Electronics and will be based in Holly, Michagan, US. In addition to the JV, Magna also made a minority equity investment in Rohinni.

Korea-based LED developer Lumens is developing a Micro-LED based HUD for the automotive aftermarket, and at CES the company demonstrated two prototypes, a Direct-HUD and a project-based one.

Lumen's HUDs use three monochrome (RGB) Micro-LED panels, which combined can reach 100,000 nits. The project one uses a projection lens for the image magnification. The smaller HUD uses the Micro-LED directly as the output to the combiner.