
PlayNitride in the race for Micro LED wearable displays
Micro LED displays are built by jointing together many chip-sized micro LED arrays, and because they are manufactured using well established semiconductor processes, they pack together micro LEDs that are much brighter than their equivalent OLED pixels, at much higher pixel densities. There is a drawback though, manufacturing large display sizes require many chips to be stitched together, making for costly die area and transfer/assembly times.
In the report, PlayNitride’s chairman and CEO Charles Li notes that it currently takes about 10 seconds to mass transfer 200,000 Micro LED chips in the lab, which would translate in 10 minutes to produce a 5-inch Micro LED smartphone panel.
The CEO estimates that today, a Micro LED smartphone panel would cost about US$300, much higher than AMOLED’s US$70-80 and LCD’s US$15, but although this price difference would make Micro LEDs uncompetitive for smartphones, they could make their first commercial debuts in smartwatches, automotive transparent displays and VR/AR devices where smaller displays are used.
Digitimes notes that to be used as displays, Micro LED chips must be transferred in mass repeatedly with excellent yields. The newspaper mentions a number of competing technologies for Micro LED mass transfer, including that of LuxVue Technology which has been acquired by Apple, one developed by eLux of which Foxconn Electronics and Sharp are shareholders and another developed by Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
Related article:
OLEDs too costly, micro-LEDs to steal the show promises canadian startup
