Industry Trends

According to the latest report, 2Q18 Micro LED Next-Generation Display Technology Market Report- Micro Projection AR & VR Market Trend and Analysis, from LEDinside, a division of the market research firm TrendForce, LEDinside analyzes the light sources of micro projection. Since Micro LED has high brightness and is power-saving, it can produce miniature module. After Micro LED technology becomes mature, it will be the new mainstream for display technology.

According to the latest report, 2Q18 Micro LED Next-Generation Display Technology Market Report- Micro Projection AR & VR Market Trend and Analysis, from LEDinside, a division of the market research firm TrendForce, LEDinside analyzes the light sources of micro projection. Since Micro LED has high brightness and is power-saving, it can produce miniature module. After Micro LED technology becomes mature, it will be the new mainstream for display technology.

Augmented Reality, commonly abbreviated as AR, is to combine virtual world on the display with real world and make it interactive through the position of the camera, actuary angle and image analysis technology. AR market will stay focused on commerce- and education-related applications. In the future, it will mainly show in the market in the product form of smart eyewear. LEDinside projected AR product shipment is expected to stand at 4 million sets in 2025, amongst those, Micro LED penetration rate is expected to reach 18%.

What are the advantages of using Micro LED in AR products? Firstly, AR product poses much higher requirements on size and weight to achieve comfortable user experience. Therefore, the projection technologies are based on micro-display that integrates all pixels showing image or video into monolithic IC module. Projection technologies including LCOS and DLP need additional light source to produce images, while Micro OLED is directly self-luminous with the pixels on IC, which can reduce the volume of light source and the overall weight, but its brightness is susceptible to the external ambient light, resulting in subdued display contrast. Compared Micro LED with Micro OLED, which is also self-emissive, has better brightness and contrast ratio.

However, there are a variety of challenges on using Micro LED in AR products at the current stage. Due to close distance, the pixel of the display has to be smaller and PPI must reach more than 2000 to avoid the problem of low resolution. Hence, in terms of the development of Micro LED technology, players still need to overcome the challenges on Micro LED epitaxy, chip size, transfer technology, wafer bonding, color conversion and inspection, etc.

According to LEDinside analysis, on a display module of 1’’, there are various resolutions. The corresponding chip dimension will also change, which adds to the difficulties during product transfer processing. Considering the yield rate is not high at the initial stage, the estimated cost will increase as rising resolutions. With transfer technology of UPH (Unit Per Hour) of 500K, the price of a 16K display will be 10 times higher than that of a 2K one. If with transfer technology of UPH 20KK, then the price variance will be of 5 times.