Taiwan’s PanelSemi Puts LED Displays On A Diet With Panels So Skinny And Light They Hang Like Tapestries

January 31, 2025 by Dave Haynes

This is one of the stories you will find in the new Sixteen:Nine Future Displays report – a free download available to all readers.

The report has in excess of 70 stories, and across almost 250 pages covers everything from profiles or market leaders to topics that don’t get much attention – like this piece about a Taiwan company that has LED displays so skinny they can hang like tapestries.

You can find the report information and download page here …

There are countless fabric and vinyl ad banners and marketing posters suspended from the ceilings of shopping malls, airport concourses and convention centers around the globe, and a Taiwan company called PanelSemi wants to convert as many as it can to digital.

Based at the opposite end of the island from bustling Taipei, PanelSemi has developed and been trying to build awareness and sales for fine pitch LED displays that are as thin and rigid as flexible acrylic sheets, and light enough to suspend from ceilings just using aircraft cable. A version of the technology has the flexibility to be rolled up and then emerge from golf bag-sized shipping cases.

The company’s main market to date has been Japan, but its owners and backers understandably have aspirations to develop sales partnerships globally.

The product is based on 1.2mm Chip On Board miniLED technology, using what it calls a hybrid substrate. The current product line is based around units that equate in size to 55-inch diagonal flat panel displays, and they can be tiled with minimal seams to create vertical or horizontal banners, with the electronics on a strip at the top.

Hanging Like Tapestries

The key selling point is its form – dramatically thinner than conventional LED cabinets, with a depth of just 1.5mm. That results in individual units weighing only 5.2 kilograms, which is how they can be suspended only with thin aircraft cable. When I was in Taiwan, I saw product suspended from the ceiling at Taipei’s main convention center – the one that hosts Touch Taiwan.

The substrate is also flexible enough to allow mounting on curved surfaces like support columns. A film coating protects the LEDs, and thin strips in the rear keep tiled units rigid when they are suspended. They can be mounted back to back, and as many as 32 units can be interconnected and driven, using what amounts to a master and slave design. The panels are also IP65-rated for waterproofing.

The pitch is arguably tighter than necessary for many applications, where viewing distances are 15 feet or more. But the company is trying to bridge needs for closer proximity viewing.

It takes specialized manufacturing to deliver this unique design, and that results in PanelSemi’s biggest barrier to marketplace adoption – price. At an MSRP of roughly $15,000 USD per square meter, they are substantially more costly than more conventional LEDs with equivalent pixel pitches.

I sensed the company is also challenged by its core structure – engineers who are good at making stuff, but not always so hot at the messy business of sales and marketing. Very common story.

There have been, of course, other companies that have developed skinny and flexible LED displays. Atlanta’s Nanolumens got its start with that sort of thing, though the PanelSemi product is much thinner and has much tighter pixel pitches than the Nano product from a decade back.

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