Conflicting Reports: Korean Display Giants Either Dialing Back Or Trying New Ways To Make Large MicroLED Displays

July 11, 2024 by Dave Haynes

There are a couple of interesting and conflicting reports about the interests and efforts of two giant electronics brands in the still-emerging microLED display sector.

One report says Samsung and LG are dialing back their activity and investments, while a separate report suggests Samsung and tech partners are going after a new way to produce large microLED-ish displays at much less cost.

According to a report from Korea and Taiwan, both Samsung Display and LG Display have decided to slow down their microLED business plans. The main reasons behind this are the long, involved and therefore high production costs.

This report gets into the why …

This move by the Korean makers is not surprising. MicroLEDs have a promising, but it will take some years before the technology is ready to deploy in mass display segments such as consumer TVs or smartphones. Both LGD and Samsung focused mostly on large-area microLED TVs, and the market for these highly expensive displays is quite limited (some estimate it as under 2000 units per year at current price points).

It is interesting to see that display makers in Taiwan (AUO and Innolux) are still highly focused on microLEDs – if only because they have no alternative next-generation display technology and they do not have any real OLED production capacity. China-based developers are also not slowing down their microLED investment so far.

But then there’s a piece up on the Taiwan tech site DigiTimes that suggests: “Together with over 30 partners, SDC (Samsung) aims to reduce prices of Micro LED TVs to one-tenth within two to three years.”

That piece is paywalled (and expensive), so I can’t read the full thing, but similar reports suggest Samsung is looking at a work-around that would greatly reduce the manufacturing time for MicroLED TVs. The process would see RGB (red, green and blue) LED chips transferred to the PCB substrate as one unit, instead of the current method of transfer R, G and B chips separately.

In theory, that would reduce the time needed to build a display by two-thirds, and also reduce the number of production flaws that then require repairs/corrections before a product is ready to ship.

I’m not convinced these products are what technical people would call true MicroLED, and Futuresource LED expert Ted Romanowitz would say it ain’t microLED if it is mounted on PCBs and not semiconductor glass wafers. Lots of manufacturers are calling their products microLED if they’re under 1mm pitch – something I’d call Marketing MicroLED, versus True MicroLED.

If you watch some of the video reports out of the display nerd fest Display Week, you see vendors showing microLED R&D samples with magnifying glass loupes over the displays, so that attendees can see the individual LEDs. One expert describes true microLED as being like the size of bacteria.

Whatever the case, it does take a LOT of manufacturing time to transfer/place what can be millions of super-teeny LED light chips, mini or micro or whatever they are, hence the sticker-shock final prices.