LED developer Lextar Electronics announced that next week at Touch Taiwan 2019 it will showcase a 5.1" transparent active-matrix microLED display that achieves an extremely high brightness - 30,000 nits.
This is Lextar's first public demonstration of a micro-LED display. Last year at Touch Taiwan 2018 the company unveiled its first micro-LED chips. The company recognizes that its micro-LED display technology will not be ready for commercialization before 2020 at the earliest.
AU Optronics announced that it will demonstrate a 12.1" LTPS micro-LED display prototype next week that features a resolution o 1920x720 (169 PPI). It seems that this is the same display shown at IFA 2018.
The 2018 display used blue LEDs with color conversion, which achieved "marvelous color performance", according to AUO.
Luumii, a joint-venture between Micro-LED developer Rohinni and Koja, announced that it has started to mass produce its micro-LED and mini-LED based notebook computer keyboard backlights and logo lighting solutions.
Luumii says that its solutions are more compact and offer a higher power efficiency compared to current solutions, and may also enhance product features and user experience as it offers colored lighting and animations. Luumii's current capacity is 34,000 units per month, and by the end of 2019 it will increase the capacity to 100,000 monthly units.
US-based Rohinni announced that it has received initial orders for its Pixalux mini-LED and micro-LED placement solution. The company expects to ship more systems in the current quarter, and anticipates higher-volume market adoption in 2020.
Rohinni says that its system combines higher throughput and accuracy for small-die applications to provide a compelling and highly-competitive solution.
TCL subsidiary China Star (CSoT) demonstrated a 3.3" 232x116 transparent Micro-LED prototype display. The display is built on an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane - CSoT says that this is the first such display ever demonstrated. The transparency is around 45%.
CSoT says that it developed the display in collaboration with PlayNitride that provided the transfer technology for CSoT.
China-based Tianma announced that it has developed a transparent 7.56" 720x480 (114 PPI) Micro-LED display. The new display, which will be demonstrated at SID next week features a transparency of over 60%.
Tianma says that the new display has an ultra-thin border of less than 0.8 mm (left and right). Tianma says that such durable and long-lasting transparent displays could be very suitable for automotive applications (such as HUDs or in-window displays).
In September 2018 it was reported that China-based Sanan Optoelectronics started to build its first micro-LED epitaxial wafer and chip production lineand in early 2019 it was reported that Sanan plans to start sampling Micro LED chips as early as January 2019.
Now Sanan announced that it has signed a contract with the Gedian Economic and Technological Development Zone in China's Hubei Province to setup a 12 billion Yuan ($1.78 billion USD) Mini-LED and Micro-LED production site.
Market research firm Yole Développement has been following the Micro-LED market for some years with some very interesting insights and forecasts.
Yole's technology & market analyst Zine Bouhamri was kind enough to discuss Yole's Micro-LED views with us. Mr. Zine is is a member of the Photonics, Sensing & Display division at Yole and he's deeply involved in the business development of the Displays unit activities.