France-based microLED developer Aledia has closed a new financing round, raising €120 million from existing investors. The company also appointed Pierre Laboisse as its CEO (Giorgio Anania, the previous CEO, remains on the company’s board of directors).
Aledia's investors include CEA Investissement, Supernova Invest, and the SPI and Ecotechnologies funds. In 2020 Aledia announced that it plans to establish a 140 million euros LED production fab in Champagnier, near Grenoble in France. The company already raised 110 million Euros towards that goal, and now it has raised another significant amount of money. In total, the company raised over €360 million to date.
Aleida now states that it is ready to start production, and its next challenge is to market and find customers for its microLED displays.
Aledia, a MicroLED Industry Association member, was spun-off from CEA-Leti, to commercialize 3D-Nanowire LED technology. The company has over 250 patent families (granted, or in application) and has two nanowire LED platforms:
- The most mature, now being optimized for volume manufacturing, is based on blue-emitting GaN nanowires on 8’’ silicon wafers, using color conversion for green and red colors. This platform has one of the smallest µLED (1.2µm in diameter) with up to 30% WPE, and has demonstrated the first 300mm µLED wafers fully operational. With this platform Aledia is releasing its first product, a 160µm RGB single-chip LED for fine pitch videowalls and luxury TVs.
- Aledia next-generation microLED platform (Platform 2), still in R&D, allows direct emission in RGB (all colors obtained with GaN) with a controlled emission angle — most of the light can be emitted in a +/- 20° cone. This platform targets 6500ppi (2µm subpixel) single-chip RGB arrays for AR applications.
Aledia's epiwafer production uses Veeco's CVD production equipment.