Touch Taiwan 2024 took place at the Nangang Exhibition Center in Taipei from April 24th to 26th. The use of Micro LED has expanded to include home theaters, smart automotive cockpits, retail stores, augmented reality, and wearable devices. The Micro LED displays have become thinner, brighter, more energy-efficient, and more compact. Key exhibitors included Ennostar, AUO, ASMPT, Contrel, Aledia, PlayNitride, WG Tech, and Innolux. Thanks to the relentless efforts of numerous equipment, Micro LED, material, panel, and brand manufacturers, we now see the successful mass production of products like Samsung’s 89-inch Micro LED TV and Tag Heuer’s Micro LED watch in the Micro LED industry. Moreover, Samsung, AUO, Leyard, Unilumin, and Lenovo have showcased Micro LED transparent displays, demonstrating its emergence as another potential application for Micro LED.

As TrendForce analyzes, Micro LED will be applied to automotive knobs, transparent windows, and head-up displays (HUDs). In response to drivers’ needs, their user experience can be fully upgraded through the combination of Micro LED- known for its high brightness, high contrast, wide color gamut, and quick response—with flexible, curved, rollable, haptic feedback and other integrated smart cockpit displays.

Ennostar

With the mission of “Drive Enlightening Innovation”, Ennostar has integrated its research and development capabilities in automotive lighting, advanced displays, and smart sensors to continually achieve technological and product innovations, aiming to provide more desirable solutions for customers and stimulate industrial development.

This year, Ennostar has accomplished encouraging progress in the development of Micro LED technology. The exhibitor adopted the MAC (Monolithic Array Chip) process to incorporate red, green, and blue colors into just one die (23x23µm), turning it into an independent pixel. The proposed process helps simplify production procedures throughout the supply chain and accelerate manufacturing. Moreover, it solves the low efficiency problem of native red diodes at a small chip size and overcomes the forward voltage discrepancy between red and blue / green lights. During the event, Ennostar also showcased an RGB Micro LED vertical chip packaged into the 4-in-1 type as well as its 8-inch Micro LED (GaN on Si) expertise.
 

Automotive Lighting: Matrix LED headlights with high-performance LEDs that can be individually controlled help avoid direct glare on pedestrians and can even project images or text, improving safety in identifying driving conditions. An ambient light with the LED D65 settings maintains consistent color effects in various environments due to its color accuracy and separate red, green, and blue temperature compensation functions.

Micro LED Automotive Display: Ennostar-affiliated Epistar and Lextar have both supplied the 2016 / 3030 LEDs to automakers in Europe, the US, and China. Notably, the 3030 LED features a transparent leadframe with white adhesive attached to the top, achieving a beam angle of up to 160°. Moreover, the product offers great value, which has garnered attention from competitors in the market. To meet the demand for slim displays from its automaker customers, Ennostar managed to develop and ship the 1010 (CSP) / 1515 LED samples; the products are likely to be installed in their 2026-2027 car models.

IR Sensing: Regarding TWS application, Ennostar offers not only SWIR LEDs and InGaAs photodiodes but also an integrated PPG sensor SiP that is the smallest in the industry. The sensor features heart rate, blood oxygen, and body temperature measurement and ensures earbud comfort and esthetics. Additionally, the exhibitor presented smart watches and smart rings featuring its high-brightness light source sensor solutions, as well as the SWIR glucose monitoring technology that has been popular in recent years. In brief, Ennostar has exemplified the prosperous development of smart optical sensing.

AUO

AUO showcased a comprehensive Micro/Mini LED smart cockpit solution comprising a 52-inch Mini LED pillar-to-pillar display, Micro LED knob, Micro LED window transparent display, Mini LED panoramic head-up display (P-HUD), driver monitoring system, and rollable Micro LED display for rear-seat entertainment. The solution not only presents information while maintaining a wide field of view for the driver but also creates a flexible Micro LED screen for the front passenger. Moreover, AUO installed a camera at the display area without compromising display quality, allowing the user to make direct eye contact with the person on a video call and creating an excellent two-way communication experience.

Starting in 2024, Samsung, Leyard, Unilumin, and Lenovo have showcased their Micro LED transparent displays at events like CES, WNC, and InfoComm (Beijing). AUO has overcome the challenge of “the bigger the screen, the lower the yield rate”, creating a 31-inch Micro LED display—the world’s largest screen of its kind—powered by advanced driving schemes. The display is suitable for various use and can be installed at various locations.

Another highlight was the 30-inch glasses-free 3D display featuring a Micro LED panel at the front (high transparency, high brightness, and quick response) and a low-reflection A.R.T LCD panel at the back. The dual-layer design creates an image plane with different depths of field, meeting the needs for 2D and 3D presentation. The display enables simultaneous viewing from any distance and angle, providing an immersive experience for numerous viewers at a time.

ASMPT

In response to the Micro LED market demand, ASMPT has announced stamp transfer / bonding equipment, the AD300Pro and laser transfer machine LT300Pro, of which the output (UPH) depends on the chip size, carrier size, and tape materials requested by customers.

According to TrendForce, the stamp transfer / bonding equipment is suitable for Micro LED watches / automotive displays / ADB headlights, namely the market of displays with ≥220 PPI. ASMPT has shipped its machines to display manufacturers worldwide and installed in mass production line. It is projected that there will be several Micro LED end products launch in 2H24. A challenge facing the stamp transfer / bonding technology is that heating is required during the bonding process, so the co-planarity must be strictly limited to ≤2µm.

As the required equipment precision level becomes higher every year, ASMPT’s laser transfer machine LT300Pro is able to achieve a precision level of ±2μm @ 3σ at the x- and y-axis. In addition to mass transfer, the LT300Pro features refilling with UPH up to 5KK.

Contrel

Contrel has developed comprehensive strategies for the Micro LED business, providing laser mass transfer, mass repair, and single-chip repair equipment. The manufacturer managed to develop the second-gen Laser Induced Transfer Bonding (LITB) technology and won the Gold Panel Awards at Touch Taiwan 2024. The awarded equipment is capable of laser mass transfer, bonding, and repair, all of which are integrated into one machine. It has three major features:

1. the equipment is able to achieve LED mass release and metal lead bonding without the need of fluxes and the purchase of additional heaters. This new feature will transform conventional manufacturing processes by simplifying production with greater efficiency and greater alignment accuracy of ±1.5µm, surpassing the industry average (±2-3µm).
2. The featured Smart & Selective Mass Repair (SSMR) technology allows manufacturers to increase product yield to 99.999%, effectively repair defective products, and reduce rework rate, thereby saving a large amount of materials and energy.
3. The equipment can largely shorten the time of Micro LED mass transfer. For example, to produce a 10-inch FHD display, the required time is cut from 5 hours to only 0.5 hour (12KK/UPH). In brief, the equipment delivers higher-than-ever efficiency and provides exceptional competitive advantages for the Micro LED display industry.

Aledia

Aledia successfully debuted three products at Touch Taiwan 2024. Firstly, 160x160µm 2D LED bonded with CMOS driver, aiming to be applied for active matrix backlight market with dimming zone 2,000 and above.

Aledia has reached a significant milestone on single 3D Nanowire LEDs. The EQE of Blue Micro LED has come to 32% for Micro LED chips as small as 3.5µm Micro LEDs displays can be built from mass transfer and color conversion of these Micro LED chips on a TFT backplane.
Aledia also indicated that there are two solutions of 160x160µm 3D Nanowire based RGB LEDs, divided into with CMOS drivers for passive Matrix backplane, and without CMOS drivers for TFT based tiles. Furthermore, those products are targeted on ≤P0.7 ultra-fine pitch display. Since the bottleneck and cost reduction challenges on Micro LED display are mass transfer, repair and backplane, when it comes to active-matrix display, Aledia proposed 160x160µm 3D Nanowire LEDs in the market. Three colors are build in the same LED chip to avoid mass transfer and side wiring LTPS by simply and directly bonded on 2-layer PCBs.

PlayNitride

At Touch Taiwan 2024, PlayNitride presented Samsung’s 89-inch Micro LED TV for which it is the Micro LED supplier, demonstrating its capability to help the South Korean giant lead the era of high image quality TVs. Compared with other products, Micro LED video walls / TVs offer multiple advantages including a wider viewing angle, high brightness and contrast, greater reliability, and no moiré pattern.
At the AR glasses zone, the company exhibited a 0.49-inch full-color Micro LED display. The specifications have been improved in all aspects thanks to collaborations with optics firms, largely reducing the cost.

WG Tech

Mini LED Backlighting: The 65-inch Mini LED TV is engineered with WG Tech’s zero-optical distance (0 OD) glass-based backlight board technology. The technology enables its branded customers to produce large displays that are eco-friendly, energy-efficient, easy to dissipate heat, ultra-slim, and lightweight with OLED-grade luminous efficacy while maintaining the level of cold display temperature.
Mini LED Video Wall / TV: Unlike the existing self-emitting displays that come with LTPS or PCB backplane, WG Tech adopts TGV glass compatible with ultra-fine circuits, satisfying the current level required by Micro/Mini LEDs. The company is shipping its TGV glass samples to manufacturers in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, with the product pixel pitch ranging between P0.6 and P1.0.

Innolux

During the event, Innolux showcased a 187-inch spliced Micro LED display. This product features high-definition, detailed, and uniformly smooth image quality, theater-level vivid and saturated high color gamut, exceptional ambient light contrast, and frameless design. Presenting quantum-dot color conversion combined with active matrix, the company won the Gold Panel Awards 2024.

Author: Joanne / TrendForce

 

TrendForce 2023 Micro LED Market Trend and Technology Cost Analysis
Release Date: 31 May / 30 November 2023
Language: Traditional Chinese / English
Format: PDF
Page: 160 / Year

TrendForce 2023 Global Automotive LED Product Trend and Regional Market Analysis
Release Date:
1. PDF (166 Pages)- 30 June 2023
2. EXCEL- 30 June 2023 and 31 December 2023
Languages: Traditional Chinese / English

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