ISE 2025: Even The Components Companies Are A Little Loose About MicroLED
February 8, 2025 by Dave Haynes
In the last hours of ISE Friday I took a swing through one of the main display halls and came across a stand for the LED component manufacturer Seoul Semiconductor, which sells not to the pro AV crowd but to the other display manufacturers at ISE.
What stopped me was a pair of display totems that were positioned as prototypes for using microLED for use cases like advertising.
They were very crisp, very bright, and after a lot of back and forth, I had the folks chatting with me conceding they were not microLED.
The stand is more the sort of thing you’d see at a Society for Information Display show for display nerds than for companies that specify, buy and deploy screens – with samples of chip wafers and diagrams explaining chip sizes and stuff that escapes me, since I a have journalism degree and not a masters in electrical engineering.
It says microLED all over the stand, but it turns out the intent was to show manufacturers where the Korean company is at and going with microLED. The totems were actually miniLED right now but the short-term roadmap gets Seoul Semi to true microLED.
That 4000 nit display on the right would cost $40K USD if you could buy it, but there is no real market for that given the price.
To give you a sense of the size of microLED, this glass jar has a bunch of specks that look like glitter, but they are LED light chips. And they are 225 microns, or substantially larger than the sub 100 micron threshold for true microLED. The real stuff, you need a microscope to see. That size reflects the big challenge with the tech – to somehow place millions of those specks accurately on electronics and then have them powered and all working together.
The Seoul Semi guys said the plan is to get there, and while they conceded the stand makes it look like they are already there, the intent is to show progress and intention. I have less issue with that than companies that have products in commercial exhibits, intermingled with other products that are for sale.
Like Yaham. Way back in Hall 8 the company had a stand with displays that were very clearly labelled as MicroLED. I poked at a senior sales person who confirmed microLED, but when I started asking about chip size, she caved, and admitted it was much more mainstream Chip on Board miniLED. She said the terminology was a moving target and there was no particularly clear definition of microLED.
There is.
Bottom line, microLED exists but true MicroLED videowall products that are not six or even seven figures – because of manufacturing costs in these early days – are still rare.
And bottom line, for most use-cases, that Yaham faux microLED does the job more than well enough as a fine pixel LED video wall.
There is a very cut and dried definition. It the size of the die. Period. Ugh. Marketing people.