In the recent article ‘Lumens Begins Producing Both Small and Large Sized Micro LED Samples‘ by LEDinside, Lumens was mentioned as starting prototype production of small and large Micro LED display displays. This is a very interesting article on many levels, which I want to discuss here in more detail.
Who is Lumens?
If you are not in tune with the LED industry, Lumens Co Ltd may not be a very well known name as a developer of displays for you. In case you know, just skip to the next paragraph. Lumens is a mid-sized company providing packaged LEDs to various industries including the display industry. The company is reported to be a supplier of packaged light sources for BLUs to Samsung.
We have reported on”Lumens Planning HD HUD Using Micro-LED Soon‘ and ‘KIMM Develops ‘Roll Transfer Process’ to Speed Up Micro LED Production‘ before and the update indicates that they are ready to make their first prototypes as described in these articles.
From this perspective, making display maybe a far stretch, however we know from other LED display makers that they all started by assembling LED on a PCB and developed into a display maker from there. As it seems Lumens is following the same idea in the micro LED arena.
Micro LED is it Going Small or Large?
As I have discussed in earlier articles, the micro LED technology is struggling with the direction it is taking as well as the best target application. While small displays seem a much easier target as it is an old wisdom that making displays larger is always more difficult (think of PDP and LCD for example), at the same time the demand on pixel density for small displays for the mobile market has reached a level that makes it very difficult to make them via a pick and place process.
Lumens is aiming to avoid this issue by addressing smaller market segments that do not require super high pixel densities or overly large sizes. Nevertheless they do address small and large form factors with their newly announced prototypes.
In the small display size they are going after a half inch (0.57″) display for the automotive HUD market, while the large form factor is in the 100″+ range for the digital signage market. Both are decent sized market segments that allow Lumens to avoid competing in the mass markets of smartphones and 4K TVs. Since OLED and LCD technologies are fighting over controlling the mass markets (even though in the smartphone market the market direction is definitely heading towards OLED) quality has to be very high, while prices are very low. That’s not a good place to introduce a new display technology, as the industry has learned in the past.
What is the technology and where does it come from?
So, here we have a mid-sized company that developed a micro LED manufacturing technology that can compete with all the companies developing the same technology backed by large venture capital resources. What are the chances of success? Well, actually pretty good, it seems, as the technology was developed by KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials) a government-funded research institute under the Korean National Research Council of Science and Technology (NST).
The technology is a three step process as shown in the image and is not even listed as a major achievement on the KIMM website. There is a related research project that works on transferring backplane structures from solid carrier plates to flexible ones and thus creating a flexible device. This seems pretty close to what the overall process is capable of.
The process uses a three step process with the first two steps depositing the active matrix and then the LED chips onto a hard substrate. The third step is a transfer of the AMLED structure to a flexible substrate creating a flexible and stretchable micro LED display.
As mentioned by LED Inside, the small 0.57″ display will be addressing the automotive HUD market and is using 921,600 LED chips with an edge length of 8 um. This means that the display will have HD resolution, however it is unclear if the LED chips contain three colors or if they are just making a monochrome HD display.
The large digital signage display with over 100′ diagonal is using a much larger LED chips with 300um edge length. There was no mentioning of the expected resolution of this display, however anything below FHD is most likely not going to be successful in the market anyway.
Why Lumens and not Samsung or LG?
This is really the most interesting question of all. Why has the Korean government developed such a technology and given it to a relative newcomer in the display arena such as Lumens? This leaves a lot of room for speculation.
First of all we need to ask ourselves if Samsung and LG got a first look at the technology before Lumens even came into play. If this is so, did Samsung and LG believe that the micro LED technology is not competitive with OLED and LCD for the existing markets or could they not agree who gets the rights? As a reminder, in the case of OLED, both companies got access to the technology*, however they agreed to address different markets during the development phase. Samsung went after small displays and LG went after the large sizes, a decision that did not work out so well for LG. Maybe the Korean government did not want to create a similar issue with micro LEDs.
All in all, this development is somewhat surprising and I wonder if we ever will learn the truth on how this all came together? NH
Analyst Comment
*I take a different view from Norbert here. Samsung had a more innovative and technologically ambitions approach to OLED than LG, which basically relied on patents it bought from Kodak. Unfortunately, Samsung’s approach would not scale to large sizes, while LG has not been able to move to small sizes. There has also been dramatically less cooperation in OLED than in LCD. Samsung, in particular, has taken a fiercely protective approach to its OLED technology and business. I don’t believe that the firms ever agreed not to compete with each other. They tried to do so, but were not successful. – BR
