Auto Displays Seen By Taiwan’s Ennostar As First Scaled Use-Case For MicroLED

March 27, 2025 by Dave Haynes

This is a little nerdy but interesting, as it shows the direction of one of the Taiwan companies putting a lot of money and resources in microLED as an emerging part of the display market.

Ennostar, which has Taiwanese display giant AU Optronics (AUO) as its biggest shareholder, sees automotive displays and lighting as the big initial market for microLED, and intriguingly, also as a teeny, high-performing optical source for shortish-range data communications. Ennostar also recently announced it is merging a pair of companies that might be familiar – EPISTAR and Lextar – into a single subsidiary.

Like other companies actively investing in R&D for microLED, much of the work is in areas like boosting light efficiency, reducing light chip sizes and improving manufacturing yield – the necessary minimization of dead or flawed light pixels during manufacturing.

From Ennostar PR:

Ennostar has recently achieved significant breakthroughs in microLED technology, improving blue and green light efficiency by 10% to 15%, and dramatically enhancing red light efficiency by 90%. Additionally, substantial improvements in mass transfer yield have enabled Ennostar to meet the rigorous quality standards of end customers.

Further advancing its next-generation innovations, Ennostar has successfully reduced chip size by 40%, while simultaneously lowering production costs, enhancing resolution and luminous efficiency, and accelerating market adoption. Through its i-Pixel  product series, Ennostar leverages an advanced chip-scale packaging (CSP) platform to deliver higher brightness, lower power consumption, and 3D packaging solutions, meeting diverse application needs.

With its high brightness, high contrast, and low power consumption, Ennostar’s microLED technology is ideally suited for in-cabin displays, transparent HUDs (head-up displays), and adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlamps. Ennostar is actively partnering with leading automakers and Tier 1 suppliers to accelerate the adoption of microLED in next-generation smart vehicles.

In AI optical communication, the demand for high-speed optical modules in AI servers is projected to exceed $24 billion by 2028. Leveraging its deep expertise in III-V compound semiconductors, Ennostar is developing three AI optical communication technologies to address different application scenarios. Among these, microLED offers a compact, high-performance optical source, capable of high-speed data transmission through matrix arrangements with hundreds of multi-channel setups. With its high-temperature resistance and energy efficiency, microLED is emerging as the most cost-effective optical transmission source for next-generation AI high-speed communication within a 10-meter range.

Me: It would take a much bigger brain than mine to explain how that bit works …

Ennostar continues to deepen its collaboration with the ecosystem, driving technological innovation and optimizing manufacturing processes to accelerate the mass production and widespread commercialization of microLED. As microLED enters a phase of rapid industrialization, Ennostar is committed to working closely with industry leaders to drive adoption across automotive, AI optical communication, and high-end display markets, creating greater value for the industry.

So … you’ll note that high-end displays – like super-premium TVs and video walls – are seen as an opportunity, but likely sometime down the road as costs are reduced and manufacturing yields improve. I met with AUO last fall when I was working on the Future Displays report. It was evident at that time that auto was seen as the near-term opportunity because of the relatively small scale of products and the capabilities microLED bring to blinged-out vehicle cabins.

You can read a LOT more about microLED in the Future Displays report, which is a totally free download. That massive 240+ page report now has some 1,500 PDF downloads and e-zine views. You can get it here …