The Leti booth at the Display Week exhibition. (Credit: M. Brennesholtz)
Leti is a technology research institute founded in 1967 and is currently a part of CEA Tech. CEA Tech is a French research institute which, much like IMEC in Belgium, Fraunhofer in Germany or ITRI in Taiwan, specializes in partnering with industrial companies for state-of-the-art research projects. CEA Tech has about 4,500 researchers out of 17,000 total employees. This including the approximately 1,900 researchers at Leti. Leti focuses on micro- and nanotechnologies and their integration into systems. Of those 3000 scientists, about 200 are involved in opto-electronic systems, such as GaN-based micro-LED microdisplays. (for more on LETI, see our report on the open day last year)
The two other divisions at CEA are List, which focuses on smart digital systems and Liten, which focuses on new energy technologies and nanomaterials.
Two papers at the SID symposium were presented by CEA-Leti researchers: paper 59-4, an invited paper titled “Electro-Optical Size-Dependence Investigation in GaN Micro-LED Devices” and Paper 75-3 titled “UV-Curable Thin-Film Packaging for OLED-Based Microdisplays.” I talked to Dr. Hani Kanaan, Lighting Program Manager & Business Development, from the Leti Optics and Photonics Department, New Applications for Photonics Group. He said there were actually about 10 Leti-related papers being given at SID but most of them were listed under Leti’s industrial partners’ names. In addition, Leti and its partner III-V Lab presented two papers at Display Week 2017 on the world’s first micro-LED microdisplay with a resolution of 873 × 500 and a 10-micron pixel pitch. In their Display Week 2017 exhibition booth, they demonstrated this GaN micro-LED microdisplay in both blue and green versions.
Dr. Kanaan told me that Leti Innovation Days were scheduled for July 4-5 at the Leti facility in Grenoble, France. On the program are topics such as
- Quantum computing: from lab to fab
- New advances in materials
- The virtues of photons
- Bio-inspired circuits
- 5G: Towards less redundant processing
In addition to its main location in Grenoble and other locations in France, Leti has offices in Silicon Valley and Tokyo.
Dr. Kanaan told me Leti was at the SID exhibition not to demonstrate products, since it is Leti’s industrial partners that make products, not Leti. Rather, Leti was trying to find new industrial partners and expand its footprint in the display space. –Matthew Brennesholtz
Analyst Comment
Last year we were able to attend the open day but couldn’t this year. However, we have been able to arrange a visit and plan a report later in June. (BR)
