French research institute, Leti of CEA Tech, announced a new technology development based on CMOS for GaN Micro LED displays manufacture. Researchers said the new process is capable of producing high performance Micro LED displays for a wide range of applications from smart watches to TVs.

The approach fabricates elementary units of all-in-one red, green, blue (RGB) Micro LEDs on a CMOS driving circuit, and transfers the devices to a simple receiving substrate. The units are fabricated with a full semiconductor, wafer-scale approach.

(Image: CEA-Leti)

François Templier, CEA-Leti’s strategic marketing manager for photonic devices, said, “The CMOS-based approach provides higher brightness and higher resolution Micro LEDs and is a game changer for very large TVs.”

One challenge for current Micro LED manufacture is improving the performance of the driving electronics, which require more power to deliver brighter images and more speed to support continuously increasing demands for high display resolution. CEA-Leti’s new approach fabricates CMOS-driven, high-performance GaN Micro LED displays with a simplified transfer process that eliminates the use of the TFT backplane. RGB Micro LEDs are stacked directly onto a micro-CMOS circuit, and each unit is transferred onto a simple receiving substrate. Then, the RGB Micro LEDs and the backplane are fabricated on a single semiconductor line.

CEA-Leti presented the technology breakthrough on May 14 at Display Week 2019.