To fight Korean panel makers OLED With technology and market influence, LED factories in Taiwan are actively developing Micro LED technology. However, the manufacturing process of Micro LED still needs to be broken. Therefore, the Taiwan factory will first use Mini LED as a transitional solution to meet OLED; for example, Innolux will publish a new brand. 'AM miniLED ', Aimed at automotive panel market, it is expected to be shipping in volume production this year could.
OLED is the mainstream today Display technology However, multi-patented OLED panel by Samsung (Samsung), LG (LG) and other Korean factory grasp, Taiwan LED factory on OLED technology and market layout is relatively backward. To this end, Taiwan companies aim to have some technical advantages of the Micro LED, We hope to use this to expand the market advantage and dominance of the panel.
However, Micro LED still has many challenges to be overcome in the process, especially in the case of mass transfer. Micro LED's wafer transfer yield is required to reach 99.9% or more, so it can meet the output standard; therefore How to improve the wafer transfer yield is the biggest challenge for the current development of Micro LED. It is reported that the current number of transfer can reach 2,500, and it is expected to reach 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 (that is, Mini LED).
For example, Innolux released automotive panels using AM miniLED technology, and hopes to seize the automotive application market. Ding Jinglong, executive vice president of the Innolux Technology Development Center, said that AM miniLED can achieve the same level of contrast as OLEDs in automotive applications. , In addition, OLEDs can resist the rigorousness of the picture sharpness, and there will be no OLED on-vehicle applications can not meet the reliability of high temperature and other reliability, life and branding and other issues, with many competitive advantages.
Ding Jinglong pointed out that AM miniLED means the active type formed by TFT matrix The circuit (AcTIve Matrix, AM) drives the miniLED so that it can really take advantage of its performance and at a reasonable cost.
Ding Jinglong explained that if you want to compete with OLED in the sharpness of the picture, you must achieve top-level HDR. That is, Local Dimming Zones must have hundreds of zones and thousands of zones. Sufficient, that is, the basic idea of the Mini LED is to add the idea of each LED as a partition. However, if it is traditional LED backlight From the perspective of the source driver circuit architecture, this concept can increase the cost and design difficulty due to the use of too many components. In view of this, Innolux uses an active matrix TFT circuit to drive the 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 AM miniLED as a medium-term strategic product, and the automotive market will be an important application for AM miniLED commercialization. Goal; In the future, AM miniLED backlights for flexible substrates will be further developed to match the profiled/curved surfaces. LCD , To meet the design and appearance requirements of automotive customers.
