Display Week: Smartkem’s CEO Explains The Challenge With Making MicroLED, And How His UK Firm Deals With That
May 15, 2025 by Dave Haynes
Display Week is on right now in San Jose – a conference and small trade show that attracts display nerds from all over the planet. I’ve been – though not this year – and it is the sort of event that’s best suited to people with more than a casual interest in what’s new with the technology that drives information displays and TVs.
The technology video blogger Charbax goes to numerous shows through a year, and he’s at Display Week doing extended, quite technical interviews at stands. I have watched a few, and despite paying attention to this stuff, I don’t have the electrical engineering degree needed to really grasp most of what’s been demo’d and touted.
But … this video with the CEO of Smartkem, a Manchester, UK chemical technology company, is interesting, as Ian Jenks explains in relatively lay terms what his team has developed and why the pro display sector should care.
His company is primarily focused on a new approach to microLED display manufacturing that’s intended to address the primary barrier in microLED adoption: manufacturing costs. Smartkem’s organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) technology uses semiconductor and dielectric inks that get applied directly to display substrates.
I mention this because Jenks very concisely lays out the big challenge with true microLED, which involves light emitters so small they require magnification tools to even see individual pixels. He suggests a 40-inch microLED display module might require bonding some 25 million microLEDs, with extreme accuracy. Even at 99.999% working pixels, that would mean 1,000s 0f visible defects, like dead pixels.
So that necessitates the stuff coming out of manufacturing then need to be “reworked” to address those defects – adding much more time and cost to a product that’s already expensive.
Another interesting note is that Jenks doesn’t see the microLED market being about direct view super-premium displays. He says there is a vast addressable market for LCDs that are getting better and better because of locally dimming the backlights that illuminate the liquid crystal. Right now, miniLEDs is making for better visuals, because instead of generally lighting up the rear of a display, more teeny lights in the rear that are individually addressable (controlled) can turned off and on, so what’s black in a piece of video is truly black on the screen because that part of the backlight is off. Jenks says microLED would add brightness and even tighter control of screen backlighting.
Right now, Smartkem is starting down that path with microLED in package backlights, that I THINK are in partnership with AUO.
A lengthy piece about Smartkem is included in the free to download Future Displays report, which came out in January.
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