Speaking of Micro-LED…
Samsung has a micro-LED TV called “The Wall”, aptly named for its 110” diagonal size, or 8’ wide by 4.5’ high or over 5,170 in2 of surface area. At ~$150,000, it is out of the price range for most, so Samsung is taking steps to reduce the price by changing the way the sets are manufactured. When producing these sets, Samsung moved each red, green, and blue, micro-LED individually from a singulated wafer to the TV substrate. For a 4K display, that would entail 8.29m pixels, each with three micro-LEDs (red, green, and blue), a slow process regardless of the technology used, making it costly, especially when such a large number of very small LEDs will result in some chips being damaged, further slowing the production process as they are tested and replaced individually.
Samsung is working toward combining the red, green, and blue micro-LEDs into a tri-color micro-LED chip that will be packaged as a single pixel, and would, in theory, reduce the number of die to be transferred from almost 25m to ~8.3m. We assume that the tri-color packages have been tested before transfer and are KGD (Known Good Die), which would reduce the possibility of transferring non-functioning die. There would still be non-working die when the transfer is completed but we expect the yield should be higher overall if there is not a substantial number of additional steps to combine and package the three die.
As we have noted previously, there are many ways in which micro-LED die can be transferred to a substrate, and there is no particular process that has been universally adopted by any micro-LED producers (see our 02/12/21 note for details), and it seems that Samsung is still trying various techniques to reduce the transfer bottleneck, increase yield, and lower overall production costs. We believe Samsung has explored pick & place, array stamping, and magnetic self-assembly, but continues to explore a number of potential transfer and repair processes in order to make micro-LEDs a commercially viable technology in the future.
Samsung is working toward combining the red, green, and blue micro-LEDs into a tri-color micro-LED chip that will be packaged as a single pixel, and would, in theory, reduce the number of die to be transferred from almost 25m to ~8.3m. We assume that the tri-color packages have been tested before transfer and are KGD (Known Good Die), which would reduce the possibility of transferring non-functioning die. There would still be non-working die when the transfer is completed but we expect the yield should be higher overall if there is not a substantial number of additional steps to combine and package the three die.
As we have noted previously, there are many ways in which micro-LED die can be transferred to a substrate, and there is no particular process that has been universally adopted by any micro-LED producers (see our 02/12/21 note for details), and it seems that Samsung is still trying various techniques to reduce the transfer bottleneck, increase yield, and lower overall production costs. We believe Samsung has explored pick & place, array stamping, and magnetic self-assembly, but continues to explore a number of potential transfer and repair processes in order to make micro-LEDs a commercially viable technology in the future.
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