What They Say
Semiconductor Engineering published quite a long article on the state of play of microLED developments and has some useful information, especially if you are new to the field. In it, Eric Virey of Yole summarises some recent fab investment decisions in microLED
- amsOsram is spending $850M to expand microLED production in Austria and Malaysia;
- Aledia announced $165M fab to make GaN-on-Si nanowire microLEDs;
- AUO is increasing its investment in PlayNitride and Epistar;
- Konka, TCL-CSOT, and Visionox announced a $100M investment;
- MICLEDI and GlobalFoundries are gearing up for microLED production, and
- San’an Optoelectronics announced $2B fab for mini/microLEDs.
He also forecasts that an Apple Smart Watch in 2024 is likely to be the first mass-produced microLED produce and that ams-Osram is its preferred supplier.
“If everything goes according to plan, we will see Apple’s microLED smart watch in 2024.”
What We Think
This is a pretty good round-up of a lot of developments in microLED, There are a few inaccuracies, though. Samsung might disagree that ‘microLEDs displays are still years from commercialization’, although that, of course depends on your definitions!
At IFA, Samsung was saying that 79″ and 101″ ‘Wall’ microdisplay TVs were going to arrive in Germany ‘this year’, although there is no pricing data, yet. However, this does suggest that the recent reports suggesting Samsung was having trouble making sets with an acceptable level of defects. The ones at IFA looked fine to me, although I didn’t spend a long time trying to inspect them and I’m not sure the content lent itself to defect detection. But that may, or may not have been a coincidence! (and of course you only need one good one of each size for IFA. (BR)
