eLux announced that the U.S. Patent Office has issued in early December US Patent No. 9,825,202 titled “Display with Surface Mount Emissive Elements”. This is the first issued eLux patent which covers the foundational work done on massively parallel fluidic assembly of µLEDs to make high resolution displays. The µLED display technology covered by this patent and 11 other filings currently in progress has the potential to revolutionize the display industry. The inorganic µLED display will have a wider color gamut, higher efficiency and better reliability compared with competing OLED technology.
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(Image: eLux) |
“We believe that the fluidic assembly methods developed at SLA and eLux will enable low cost µLED displays for video walls and ultimately television,” explained Paul Schuele, eLux’s CTO and an inventor of the technology. He went on to describe how the µLED display uses two nature low-cost technologies; namely the TFT backplanes developed for LCD displays and high brightness GaN LEDs developed for general lighting to fabricate components of the display.
Unfortunately, the pick and place and stamping techniques proposed to position µLEDs on the display backplane are both time consuming and subject to significant yield issues. eLux directly addresses these limitations using simple highly scalable fluidic assembly techniques to achieve massively parallel assembly of µLEDs at fill rates over 50 million devices per hour.
As part of the initial round of funding the company has acquired the fluidic assembly patent portfolio of Sharp corporation, which consists of 20 patent families. Patents acquired from Sharp which are most closely related to the technology covered by US 9,825,202 are:
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US 9,722,145 covering a direct emitting display with vertical µLEDs manufactured by fluidic assembly methods.
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US 9,755,110, which covers the well structures used to precisely position the assembled µLEDs in an array.
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15/190,813 (allowed) is the foundational patent for the structures that can be used to orient µLEDs (or other components) with one polarity.
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15/266,796 (allowed) covers the use of through-hole vias to enhance the yield and selectivity of fluidic assembly.
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15/197,266 (allowed) is a color conversion structure using quantum dots to generate red and green colors from blue µLEDs.
Read also:
All You Need to Know About Micro LED in 1H17
Understanding eLux’s Micro LED Patented Technologies