From The Backlight To The Self-luminous Display, Micro LED Development Blueprint Inventory

According to the latest report from LEDinside, due to the emergence of Micro LED and Mini LED, LEDs in consumer electronic displays have gradually transformed from backlighting to self-luminous roles. In the future, each LED in the display will become a pixel, which will greatly Increase the use of LED wafers.

With the breakthrough of technical bottlenecks and cost reduction, as long as a small part of the display products start to introduce this technology, the contribution to the overall LED output value will also be very large. Therefore, LEDinside estimates that after the commercialization of related products, the output value of Micro LED & Mini LED (excluding transfer) will reach 1.38 billion U.S. dollars by 2022, and will further grow to 2.891 billion U.S. dollars in 2025.

(Source: compiled by LEDinside)

Where is the short and medium-term application market of Micro LED?

Applications that require high-brightness AR projection equipment, super-large display panels such as digital LED displays, and TVs have the opportunity to introduce Micro LED technology in the past 3 years, and gradually increase the volume.

From the perspective of the overall competition pattern of the display industry, it has been observed that Japanese and Korean manufacturers hope to introduce Micro LED display technology to differentiate the market, especially in the fields of ultra-large TVs and commercial display screens. At this stage, if the traditional LCD and OLED panels are used for ultra-large displays with a size of 75 inches or more, the cost cannot be reduced due to the limitations of the innate process, and the price of the terminal products will be very high. However, if Micro LED technology is adopted, super-large displays can be made through splicing, which has the opportunity to fill the gaps in the existing display technology.

In addition to super-large displays, we have also observed that AR and other Micro LED projection applications are also in full swing. Because Micro LED has high brightness, power saving and can be made into optical and mechanical miniaturization modules, when Micro LED technology matures, it will have the opportunity to become the new mainstream of display technology. LEDinside estimates that the overall shipment of AR products will reach 4 million units in 2025, and products using Micro LED projection technology will account for 18%.

What are the benefits of AR products using Micro LED technology? First of all, AR products have very high requirements for size and weight, and must strive to be comfortable to use. Therefore, the projection technology uses Micro Display, which integrates all the pixels of the display image or video into a single-chip integrated circuit module. Technology LCOS, DLP need additional light source mechanism to generate images. As for Micro OLED, although it can directly emit light on integrated circuit pixels, reducing the volume of the light source mechanism and reducing the overall weight, it has low brightness and is easily affected by external ambient light, reducing the display contrast effect. Therefore, although it is also a self-luminous source, the Micro LED technology, which has better brightness and contrast than Micro OLED, will eventually win.

Micro LED long-term application market outlook

In the long run, if Micro LED wants to enter the mainstream display market, it must first reduce costs and increase production efficiency. Once key breakthroughs in technology and cost are achieved, Micro LED will have the opportunity to fully replace the existing display technology.

As Micro LED shrinks the size of LED chips to below 100μm, for LED chip manufacturers, new equipment is required from LED epitaxial design to chip process, such as MOCVD with higher uniformity and exposure machine with higher resolution. , Laser stripping of substrates and other equipment will increase capital expenditure and depreciation costs. In addition, since the economies of scale have not yet been achieved in the initial stage, the unit price of a single Micro LED wafer will be 5-6 times higher than that of a traditional LED wafer. With the gradual amortization of equipment and the improvement of process yield, it is expected that the cost of Micro LED will decline year by year. After five years, the unit area cost of Micro LED will have the opportunity to approach traditional LEDs.

As for the massive transfer, each major system manufacturer has a considerable number of transfer technologies under development at the same time. Due to the relatively large number of variables, it is still difficult to judge which technology will become the mainstream in the future.