Future Displays: The Path And Challenges Of MicroLED Display Technology

January 16, 2025 by Dave Haynes

This is a shortened version of a story from the Sixteen:Nine Future Displays report – a free download available to all readers. You can find the information and download page here …

Let’s be honest: while microLED display technology can deliver big, gorgeous video wall displays for the digital signage and pro AV industries, it’s not like the technology that’s already available can’t also do that. At much lower cost.

Anyone who has been to a trade show in the past couple of years has seen no end of vast and beautiful displays put together using more conventional and established Chip on Board (CoB) and miniLED technologies.

In other words, the business is not waiting for microLED to mature and come down in cost so that great-looking video wall displays can finally be possible. We’re already there.

There are some specialized use cases like medical imaging that would benefit from as many pixels as can be packed on a big screen, but for mainstream LED projects – from retail and advertising to office lobbies and control rooms – conventional LED video walls with 0.9mm or even 1.2mm pixel pitches are probably enough.

So why all the fuss about microLED?

There’s at least a couple of things, in the context of professional displays:

First, the light pixels are tiny. Think dust particles. Or bacteria. That’s why they’re called micro, and what that means is a LOT of teeny light chips can be packed into a display surface, while taking up minimal “real estate” and leaving lots of room between pixels for the black rear surface of the display. More black leads to better contrast, which typically means more beautiful, rich visuals.

Second, they generate their own light like OLED displays, but they can run brighter than OLEDs (so they’ll last longer) and don’t risk problems like screen burn-in.

They can also be embedded in materials like glass, and offer higher levels of transparency.

There’s also a sense, somewhere a little further down the display industry road, that a lot of the high costs and general growing pains associated with still-emerging technology will get resolved, and start to go away. Where LCD and OLED display fabrication plants are billion-dollar investments, microLED production can leverage much more-established semiconductor manufacturing processes and equipment.

What that means is a microLED display that now costs $100,000 or more, might well cost $5,000 within a few years. The Taiwan display manufacturer AUO, for example, expects microLED will be at cost-parity with premium OLED displays within five years.

French microLED expert Eric Virey says a curious aspect of microLED is that these tiny light emitters can actually be too small and create too much pitch between each. “Sometimes it can be deceptive because even a very, very small emitter, if the pitch – the distance between the pixels – is large, you are going to see those individual points. It’s what’s called the screen door effect. And it’s actually one of the issues with many of the microLED, like legit microLED displays that I have seen. Because they are so small that instead of seeing like an area of color, the size of the pixel, you really see that dot. And I think to get a good display out of that, people are going to have to put some sort of diffuser above that.”

Gen Z Technology

Though microLED is the display industry’s latest bright, shiny object, it belongs to the Generation Z crowd, having first been developed in 2000.

A pair of researchers at Kansas State University developed a display technology that used microscopic light-emitting diodes smaller than 100 micrometers. It took much of the next decade to progress the technology to a level that a high-resolution video display could be made using microLED technology, and more to make it a product.

In 2012, Sony showed up at CES with a 55-inch Crystal LED, and five years later at the InfoComm pro AV trade show with a full LED video wall that had pro AV people crowding around and wondering out loud, “What is that???”

It was very big, very impressive, and VERY expensive … as in many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So while interest was high, buyers were few. You might find one in an Apple store, but not in a Best Buy.

Virey says Sony’s introduction of true microLED – using its CLED or Crystal LED product, was ahead of its time but challenged to ever get wide market adoption. “We got an opportunity to get our hands on one of the Sony modules, and we did a teardown analysis. It’s definitely a very small die, with an advanced design using what we now call MicroLED In Package, or MIP. Every single pixel had its own little pieces of silicon IC to drive each pixel. So it was a beautiful design, but as you can imagine, extraordinarily expensive.”

Driving Down Costs

The cost of microLED displays is high because of the available manufacturing processes – which require millions of microscopic LEDs to be accurately placed, with faulty LEDs and any other production flaws minimized. The goal has been getting the yield – the success measure for manufacturing accuracy – up to 99.999%.

While 99% – just those two nines – would seemingly be a terrific production result, having 1 in 100 LEDs defective, in some way, means 1,000s of dead or misaligned pixels on a large display.

There has long been a push to develop “mass transfer” processes that can move and apply large batches of LEDs at once. More conventional LED manufacturing involves robotics equipment that “pick and place” packages of LED lights at blindingly fast speeds – but even with those high production speeds, a large format display might take days to build.

Apple’s investment in microLED development and intellectual property was seen as a big validator of the market potential for microLED – even if Apple’s interest was in small displays for its smartwatches and other devices.

But Apple canceled its microLED work in March 2024, citing high costs and complexity. That arguably chilled the market, and shifted interests away from wearables to niche applications like retail, transportation, and military simulators.

The manufacturing landscape has seen substantial capital investment. Ams Osram has committed $2 billion, including an $800 million manufacturing facility. Sanan, a Chinese manufacturer, has announced a $1.9 billion multi-phase investment. These large investments are creating new manufacturing hubs, particularly in Taiwan and China.

In Taiwan, two major manufacturing ecosystems have emerged. One involves AUO and companies it has ownership stakes in, Ennostar, and PlayNitride. The other involves Hon Hai (FoxConn) and Innolux. Chinese LCD manufacturers like BOE are pursuing vertical integration by partnering with LED companies to control their supply chains.

Looking Ahead

To see mainstream adoption, analysts suggest the technology needs costs to drop 20-fold and that will owe, at least in part, to moving away from traditional LED production methods and switching to semiconductor-style manufacturing. MicroLED light chips are “grown” on semiconductor wafers and one of the efforts is to make those lights smaller, so that one wafer produces 100s or even 1,000s more lights.

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing happening with scale. Because premium LED displays using COB and miniLED are already very good, microLED might only be a premium, niche product that doesn’t have enough volume to drive down costs. But without lower costs, the technology cannot expand into larger markets.

Companies like AUO are doing interesting work to set microLED apart from the LED pack – most notably with transparent microLED – positioning it as a better alternative to transparent OLED and certainly transparent LCD.

Main image: VueReal

Want to read the full report?

Sixteen:Nine Future Displays is a free download available to all readers. You can find the information and download page here …