Konka announces the APHAEA MicroLED Watch

During the 2020 Chongqing Micro-LED Industry Innovation Forum, Konka introduced the world's first MicroLED Watch, the APHAEA Watch. This groundbreaking product uses a 2-inch microLED display with a pixel pitch of 0.12 mm - which means the resolution is around 400x400. The MicroLED chips are 30 um in size.

Konka Aphaea Watch photo

It is not clear how close Konka is to commercialize this product - but in any case this is a great achievement and this is the world's first microLED wearable display shown in a real product. The display is produced on an LTPS backplane, it achieves a brightness of 1,500 nits and a color gamut of 147% DCI-P3. Konka says that battery life of this watch is up to 35 days.

 

In December 2019, Konka launched its tiled large micro-LED displays, under the APHAEA brand. The company demonstrated two such displays - a 118" 4K one that costs $240,000 and a 236" 8K one that costs $1.25 million. Konka is producing its own displays, and its microLED chips are produced using Aixtron's MOCVD systems.

Konka Aphaea Watch specifications

Wearable is indeed a market that is likely to adopt microLED displays relatively soon (although most people did not expect it so soon!). There are several players in this market, led by Apple who is reportedly working on MicroLED wearable devices for many years.

Earlier this year Taiwan's RiTDisplay demonstrated its smartwatch MicroLED prototype. In May 2019 RiTDisplay announced a strategic partnership and share swap with MicroLED developer PlayNitride. In June 2019 it was reported that a US-based smartwatch brand will start a design process in Q3 2019 using a micro-LED display that was co-developed by RiTDisplay and PlayNitride (rumors to be Apple?).

Source: 
Tags: 
Posted: Dec 19,2020 by Ron Mertens