Micro-LED videos

The MicroLED Industry Association, in collaboration with Techblick, concluded a highly successful microLED industry event last week. MicroLED-Connect 2024, which took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, brought together over 200 industry professionals, supply chain companies, researchers, investors and early stage developers.

During the event, over 40 speakers, including microLED professionals from Google, Meta, Osram, Coherent, Continental, VueReal, GlobalFoundries, and others, discusses the latest innovations, roadmaps, challenges and applications of microLEDs. 

LG Display is showcasing its stretchable micrOLED displays at the Seoul Fashion Week, taking place at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP). The company's stretchable displays are presented as part of clothing and bag concepts crafted by leading Korean designers Youn-Hee Park and Chung-Chung Lee.

The displays are 12" in size, and they can stretch up to 20% (14-inch, 40 um pixel pitch) while still showing full color images. The resolution is 100 PPI. These are the same displays the company demonstrated back in 2022. 

Samsung Display is showcasing its latest display prototypes and technologies at the International Meeting on Information Display (iMID 2024) conference on Jeju Island, Korea. One of the displays is a new stretchable microLED display.

While we know that SDC is developing stretchable microLED display technologies, this is the first time it has demonstrated a prototype publicly. Samsung did not detail much about the display, beyond saying that it has a 120 PPI and can stretch up to 125% of its original size (i.e. a 25% increase in size). The company says that this is the highest resolution stretchable display ever demonstrated, and the one that has the highest elongation rate.

We're happy to interview Valentyn S. Volkov, PhD, co-founder and Scientific Partner at XPANCEO, as part of our series of interviews with MicroLED Industry Association members. Dubai-based XPANCEO develops eXtended Computing (XC) contact lenses, a next generation computing category - based on microLED microdisplays.

Valentyn S. Volkov, PhD, co-founder and Scientific Partner at XPANCEO, is an internationally renowned expert in the field of nanophotonics and advanced materials, with 20 years of experience at leading universities and research centers.

Q: Can you introduce your company and technology?

XPANCEO is a deep tech company specializing in advanced technology, working to evolve the next generation of computing through the development of an imperceptible and weightless smart contact lens that seamlessly integrates with the wearer's natural vision. This innovative lens revolutionizes the entire concept of human-technology interaction, reshaping the way individuals engage with both the physical and digital realms, encompassing social media, content consumption, and gaming. By consolidating all personal devices into a single entity, the lens metamorphoses daily activities into an expansive Extended Reality (XR) encounter, featuring sophisticated real-time health monitoring, comprehensive practical suggestions, capabilities such as night vision and zoom, and state-of-the-art privacy and security protocols.

Innolux showed several new microLED display prototypes at Displayweek 2024, as it focuses on microLEDs as its next-generation display solution.

First, the company showcased a large 106" tiled microLED TV display, build from 96 12.3" modules. The display uses 20x40 um blue microLED chips (with QD color conversion) and an LTPS backplane.

Visionox showed a large 88-inch tiled microLED display, with a pixel pitch of 0.5 mm, based on 25 micron LEDs and an LTPS backplane. The display feature low (<5%) reflectance and a brightness of up to 1,200 nits.

Vistar also showed a 14.5" panel, a single module that is used to build the 88-inch TV. Visionox says that it developed a dedicated microLED driver IC, that enables 10-bit color depth and "True Color" presentation. Vistar says that it reaches production yields of 99.995% in its mass transfer process, and a repair process that enables perfect displays.

At Displayweek 2024, TCL CSoT demonstrated its impressive 163-inch 4K (0.9375 mm pitch) tiled MicroLED display on show, that offered very high brightness (10,000 nits).

TCL says that the display has a 'nanosecond' response time, and its lifetime rating is over 100,000 hours. This is TCL's X11H Max commercial MicroLED TV, priced at $110,000.

AUO had an impressive booth at Displayweek, showing some of its latest microLED prototypes. It is clear that the company is highly focused on microLED technology as its next-gen display strategy.

First up, with a 31" large area single-panel microLED, which AUO says is the world's largest. The display is produced on a single glass LTPS backplane, and offers 120Hz and a brightness of 500 nits. AUO calls this a Large Size A.R.T. MicroLED display.

The display industry's premier event, Displayweek, is over. We will now collect our notes, thoughts, photos and images and will share it all in the coming days. In the meantime, we'd like to detail some initial impressions.

Generally speaking, it seems as if the display industry is going through a phase of relatively little innovation, especially with the mature LCD and OLED industry segments. While it has been a very busy week, and attendance at the event seems high, the number of actual demonstrations and prototypes was not stellar and compared to previous years, the booths were smaller and some companies skipped the event this year or preferred to only show their latest displays in private settings. Some thoughts we have:

An interesting video surfaced, showing a small (reportedly 38-inch) microLED monitor prototype by Samsung, shown at a trade show:

We do not have any more information, but this is an interesting demo by Samsung. It is estimated that the monitor has a resolution of FHD (1920x1080), if Samsung is using the same tiles as the ones used in its TVs. It could be that this is not a tiled display, but we simply do not know at this stage.