Today we're starting a new series, of interviews with MicroLED Industry Association members. The first company we interview is Radiant Vision Systems, and we have Shaina Warner, Radiant''s Marketing Program Manager.
Q: Can you introduce your company and technology?
Radiant develops and manufactures test & measurement solutions that are used to evaluate the visual quality of displays, backlit components, LEDs, other light sources. Using photometric and colorimetric imagers calibrated to a model of human visual perception, Radiant offers the most sophisticated inspection technology for ensuring light-emitting products meet customer expectations for quality and performance.
Leaders in consumer electronics, virtual & augmented reality, automotive, aerospace manufacturing, and beyond rely on Radiant to ensure accuracy, automate quality control, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. We have over 30 years of proven production experience with thousands of cameras testing millions of lights and displays worldwide. We’re also happy to be a global organization, offering direct local access to products and support that help equip our customers for success.
Q: Can you say why you joined the microLED association and what it is you hope to achieve?
The future of microLED displays continues to take shape thanks to a joint effort of innovation from a community of researchers and manufacturers. From Radiant’s unique perspective in the test & measurement space, we know that the more efficiently microLED technologies can be manufactured, the more viable microLED displays become for commercialization, in terms of market cost and availability. We are excited to join the MicroLED Industry Association alongside other pioneers of microLED innovation to help with this effort: achieving quality, commercially viable components. We believe Radiant’s unique contribution to testing microLED display technologies supports this concerted endeavor to realize the potential of future microLED products.
Q: What is your biggest challenge, and success to date in the microLED industry?
One of the prevailing challenges of microLED manufacturing and testing is their small scale. Because microLEDs are also independently emissive, quality challenges can emerge to the level of a single diode (or subpixel, in the context of a display). This scale continues to demand more capable measurement systems with higher imaging resolution and better image processing & measurement techniques. The challenge has been to continue to adapt our technology and methods to measure light and color output accurately and efficiently at the shrinking scale of individual microLEDs.
Radiant’s high-resolution photometric imaging systems are applied at various stages during microLED component manufacture to address output and uniformity issues. At the panel level, we had to address particular challenges for isolating each subpixel (each microLED) as a unique measurement area while continuing to capture the entire microLED panel (varying in scale and resolution) in a single image for measurement efficiency. We recently invented new registration & measurement capability for our software, patented under US Patent 10,971,044, which greatly improves our ability to precisely isolate each microLED in an image and calculate light output from this micro-sized region of interest. The method is known as the “Fractional Pixel Method,” detailed in this whitepaper on our website.
Applying this method in solutions with our highest-resolution systems (61MP and beyond) has enabled us to support new customer projects, furthering penetration of advanced microLED technologies into the global marketplace.
Q: How do you see microLEDs changing the display industry in the next 5-10 years?
The hallmarks of microLED—their small size, high brightness, efficiency, and emissive nature—are already driving innovation in displays that can now realize higher resolution, wider color gamut, higher contrast ratio, more dynamic contrast & color, transparent compositions, and flexible or foldable compositions. I believe that in the future we will see microLED elements integrated into more substrates for the digitization of surfaces such as transparent glass and other media, which enable interactive or functional applications in completely new places. Outside of displays, I also believe microLEDs (like traditional LEDs and now OLEDs and miniLEDs) will have their place in lighting applications, enabling technologies like ultra-bright, ultra-efficient medical devices and high-precision adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlamps, just to name a few.
Join the MicroLED Industry Association today to collaborate with Radiant Vision Systems and other microLED Pioneers and help promote microLED technologies!