OLED is the mainstream display technology. However, OLED panel patents are mostly controlled by Korean factories such as Samsung and LG. Taiwan LED factory is relatively backward in OLED technology and market layout. Micro LED technology advantage, hope to expand the panel market advantages and dominance.
However, Micro LED still has many challenges in the process to be overcome, especially in the aspect of mass transfer. Micro LED's wafer transfer yield needs to be over 99.9% to reach the output standard; therefore, how Enhancing wafer transfer yield is the biggest challenge for the development of Micro LED. It is reported that the current number of transfer can reach 2,500, and it is expected to achieve a goal of transferring 10,000 pieces at a time in 2018.
Due to the aforementioned difficulties, Taiwan's LED plants have not yet seen the mass production of related products despite the company's continuous investment in the development of Micro LED. Under the circumstances that the number of Micro LED transfer, yield, and grain size have not reached the commercial level, the Taiwanese LED factory decided to promote the so-called first "Micro LED" (also known as Mini LED).
For example, Innolux announced the use of "AM miniLED" technology for automotive panels, hoping to seize the automotive application market. Infineon Optoelectronics Development Center executive vice president Ding Jinglong said that AM miniLED can achieve the same level of OLED in automotive applications. Contrast, but also in the picture sharpness and OLED content courtesy, and there will be no OLED on-board applications can not meet the high temperature and other reliability, life and branding and other issues, with many competitive advantages.
Ding Jinglong pointed out that AM miniLED means using active matrix circuit (AcTIve Matrix, AM) formed by TFT to drive miniLED, so that it can really play its performance advantage and at the same time have a reasonable cost.
Ding Jinglong explained that if you want to compete with OLED in the sharpness of the picture, you must achieve top HDR. That is, Local Dimming Zones must have hundreds of zones and thousands of zones. Enough, that is, the idea of "each LED as a partition" is added to the basic concept of the Mini LED. However, if the conventional LED backlight driver circuit architecture is concerned, this concept may be caused by too many components. , And increase the cost and design difficult. In view of this, Innolux will use active matrix TFT circuit, drive AM miniLED architecture to solve the above problems.
As mentioned above, Micro LED still has many challenges to overcome. Innolux stated that before the launch of Micro LED products, the company will use the "AM miniLED" as a medium-term strategic product while the automotive market will be the commercialization of AM miniLED. The important goal is to further develop the AM miniLED backlight source for flexible substrates in the future to match the profiled/curved LCDs to meet the design and appearance requirements of automotive customers.