Chinese LED packaging company Nationstar has demonstrated its Mini LED applications at Display International, Touch Taiwan and announced its plan to sell its subsidiary at the latest conference call on September 5th.

The development of the LED display industry has been blooming in 2018 with the progresses of Mini LED, Micro LED, Fine pitch LED and OLED showing up one after another. According to the latest report from LEDinside, it is estimated that the market value of Micro LED and Mini LED will reach US$ 1.38 billion by 2022.

Lextar has announced that the company will launch the latest Micro LED chips with the size smaller than 20 µm and two different Micro LED chip solutions for display applications at Touch Taiwan 2018.

Taiwanese panel manufacturer Innolux is to showcase its latest products including gaming panels, QLED notebook panels and smart watches with flexible OLED displays at Touch Taiwan 2018. 

Quantum Materials Corp, a U.S. based quantum dot manufacturer, has announced its achievement of exceeding 7,000 hour continuous on-time durability test for the company's cadmium-free quantum dots in a remote LED.

Telecom operator O2 has announced its partnership with pureLiFi for a trail network using LED lights to provide high-speed wireless connection for data transmission. 

Industry sources have leaked in February that LG planned to release its first Micro LED TV in September. LG Electronics will reportedly launch its Micro LED TV at the IFA electronics trade show in Germany, according to a report from The Investor. 

Lextar has released a series of Mini LED products including Mini LED RGB display modules and Mini LED backlight for notebooks and monitors. The products will be demonstrated at Touch Taiwan 2018 by the end of August in Taipei, Taiwan. 

Chinese company BOE Technology will reportedly begin trial production of Micro OLED display in the beginning of 2019 which will be applied for VR and AR, according to Korea’s ET News. 

A research team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced a fiber-based “soft hardware” with embedded LED and diode photodetectors which can be used to make clothes.

As one of the most important display shows of the industry, Touch Taiwan will take place during August 29 – 31 in Taipei, Taiwan. Manufacturers of the supply chain including LED chip, panel, driver IC and end-product applications will gather at the event to demonstrate their innovative technologies as well as to discuss the development trend of the industry. Micro LED, considered to be the next generation display technology, will be a spotlight of the event.

Nokia has announced its commercial partnership with Current by GE for applying smart city technology to Canadian cities to improve infrastructures and citizen services.

Cochlear implant is a device using electrodes to stimulate the auditory nerve to help hearing-impaired people to “hear.” But it cannot deliver complex sound as the electrode current does not move from the electrode to an auditory neuron directly. Researchers have been exploring the possibilities to replace electricity with light in cochlear implants via optogenetics technology.

Samsung revealed the cinema LED “Onyx” last year in Seoul and the product has been expanded into the international market including the U.S., China, Mexico Thailand and other countries. 

LEDinside hosted Micro LEDforum 2018 last week in Taipei, Taiwan and welcomed international speakers and attendees to join the pioneer event of the industry. Several leading institutes shared their innovative approaches of Micro LED and the technology of mass transfer is definitely the biggest focus. QMAT and Tesoro Scientific, two U.S. based start-up companies, introduced innovative materials and equipment concepts to enable ultra-fast mass transfer methods.

LiDAR sensor (LiDAR – Light Detection And Ranging) detects surrounding objects and captures their distance to the sensor by emitting a very short light pulse and measuring the time that the light travels from the sensor to the object and back. LiDAR is a key technology for several applications including autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation system, drone, measurement, sweeping robot and others. According to the 2018 Infrared Sensing Application Market Report by LEDinside, LiDAR laser market value is expected to reach USD 154 million in 2020.

A research center of Korea Aerospace University and an audio technology company, Sonictier initiated a joint project to develop a 25 square meter LED display module that is capable of passing sound through its holes.

Micro LED display has been considered as the next-generation display technology with its features of high resolution, high contrast, high brightness and wide viewing angles. To achieve these characteristics, driver IC is a key component during the manufacturing process. At Micro LEDforum 2018, LEDinside invited Macroblock, the LED driver IC specialist, to talk about how to fully realize the advantages of Mini and Micro LED display from the viewpoint of a driver IC maker.

Besides display and lighting, LED technology applications in medical field have been progressing to create possibilities for curing cancer. Researchers at Waseda University, Japan have developed an implantable device consisting of LED chips and bio-adhesive nanosheet which has successfully shrank the tumors in mice through photodynamic therapy. The result was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering journal on July 16th 2018. 

The U.S. based start-up, eLux with its patent technology of Micro LED transfer process and its business cooperation with the Foxconn Group, has been attracting attentions from the industry. LEDinside invited Paul Schule, the founder and CTO of eLux, to speak at Micro LEDforum 2018 to share the company’s technological progress and insights of the industry. 

SelfArray, a startup based in New York, shared its innovative Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) technology which uses diamagnetic levitation to align LEDs automatically at Micro LEDforum 2018. 

LEDinside was honored to invite Dr. Jae-Hyun Kim, head of the Department of Applied Nano Mechanics at the Korean Institute of Machinery and materials (KIMM) to join Micro LEDforum 2018 to introduce their advanced technology of Micro LED production. Dr. Kim and his team developed the roll-to-plate transfer method to efficiently transfer Micro LEDs and to speed up the production of Micro LED displays.

Last week at Micro LEDforum 2018, experts from the industry have shared their advanced Micro LED technologies and illustrated the possibilities of further development of Micro LED. As mass transfer is the most difficult task to tackle, many speakers have introduced their unique method to solve the issue. Uniqarta, a U.S. based start-up was invited by LEDinside to present its Laser Enabled Advanced Placement (LEAP) technology at Micro LEDforum 2018.

Micro LEDforum 2018 was held successfully yesterday on July 12th in Taipei. Nearly 300 attendees from all over the world joined the giant annual event to learn the trends of the industry and to spark idea exchanges as well as to find the opportunities for business cooperation. LEDinside was honored to invite speakers from leading institutes including eLux, Uniquarta, QMAT, KIMM, Nitride Semiconductors, V-technology, Topcon, Macroblock, KLA, SelfArray and Jasper Display to share their technologies and insights of Micro LED. 

A research team from Turkey has published its findings on a novel approach to developing new nanomaterial-based white LEDs that achieves record luminous efficiency of 105 lumens per watt in Optica, The Optical Society's journal. 

A Germany based research project coordinated by Osram Opto Semiconductors and six other partners from science and industry reported its achievement of developing optimized approaches for manufacturing small LED chips and packaging technologies.

LEDinside is excited to announce that the weather did not lead to any change of the schedule and Micro LEDforum will be held as planned tomorrow starting at AM10:00 (Check-in at AM9:00) at NTUH International Convention Center, Room 201.

LEDinside is ready to welcome the experts and professionals in the industry to join us at Micro LEDforum 2018, titled “Key Technology and Application Market – Transfer, Inspection and Drive Solution Boost,” on 12th July at NTUH International Convention Center in Taipei, Taiwan. 

Beginning with Samsung’s demonstration of its Micro LED modular TV “The Wall” at CES 2018, this year there has been news and updates about Micro LED from manufacturers and researchers all over the world. LEDinside has been following the latest movements of the industry and has revealed information of Micro LED development in the past few months. Entering the third quarter of 2018, there are more on-going developments and technical progress that we would like to share. 

Nichia considered that in 2H18, the competition between LED makers will still go on due to the excess capacity of LED backlight and the weak market demands in the past two quarters. As the prices of LED chips and packaging has been down for years, there might be more acquisitions between corporates and some collapses for small and medium sized manufacturers. Generally speaking, 2018 is a tough year for the LED industry.