UK-based Optovate announced that it has developed a technology that enables multiple microLEDs transferred in parallel from a wafer to a substrate to be aligned in one step with a precision optical array.

Optovate says that this technology is protected in a portfolio of 20 granted and pending patents dating from 2008. The company is now looking for display partners to commercialize its technology.

Yole Developpement published an interesting article discussing the patent landscape of the MicroLED industry. As of today, almost 1,500 MicroLED patents were filed by 125 companies and organization. The overall corpus has an average of 3.2 years, which makes these patents quite new.

The initial micro-LED patents, filed at around 2000-2001, were mostly by a variety of research institutes, by large companies such as Sony and Sharp but also by startups such as Luxvue (acquired by Apple). The activity in this field is still led mostly by startups, and with the exception of Sony and Sharp, mature display makers are relative latecomers.

NanoGaN (a subsidiary of UK-based Eipwafer foundry and substrate maker IQE) announced that it has purchased a portfolio of 54 quasi photonic crystals patents from Taiwan's Luxtaltek for $500,000.

NanoGaN says that these newly acquired patents have applications in optical components - including Micro-LED displays. Other possible applications are in the fields of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), modulators, silicon photonics, fiber-optic systems, biosensors and more. IQE believes that due to its existing in-house NIL capability, the firm is well positioned to commercialize the new technology.

Google was granted a new patent that describes a micro-LED based AR glasses device. This is a patent from March 2016 that was now granted.

According to the patent description, the Micro-LED active area is aligned to an array of collimating reflectors that reflect a display image back towards a user's eyes. The patent also describes a similar VR device (in which the displays are not see-through).

A few days ago Apple was awarded with 52 different patents, covering a wide range of technologies that include 3D glasses, in-air gesturing, fingerprint sensing and more.

One of these patents details a Micro-LED device that is able to both emit and sense light. We have seen similar solutions based on OLEDs - in that case the photo-diodes were placed between the OLED pixels, to create a micro-display that can sense light (possible applications are for example eye-tracking in a VR headset).