Hot research! How will the future development of LED displays achieve a leap?

Recently, the Korea Research Institute has manufactured full-color flexible Micro LED devices through blue LED and perovskite quantum dot color conversion layer technology, successfully achieving a further leap in Micro LED products and creating another breakthrough in the Micro LED display market. So what is the significance of achieving this technological breakthrough for LED displays? What are the perovskites involved in research technology, and why are they always favored by academic research? Come and have a look together!

Market boosts technological development

In today's society, displays are everywhere, and as the market's demand for displays continues to increase, higher requirements have been put forward for display technology. Display screens of various technologies are also undergoing a process of upgrading and product upgrades. From the original CRT displays, to traditional LCD and LED displays, to OLED and Micro-LED, the upgrading of display technology has greatly improved the display effect, providing a more convenient and effective window for people to obtain external information. Among them, microled has attracted increasing attention from the industry due to its strong advantages. Micro-LEDs have the advantages of low working voltage, high luminous efficiency, fast response speed, stable and reliable performance, and wide operating temperature range. They are used in televisions, computers, micro projectors, maskless lithography, mobile phones, watches, AR, VR, etc. There are important application needs in small and medium-sized display devices.

Data shows that by 2025, the global Micro LED market will exceed US$3.5 billion, and the global Micro LED market is expected to exceed US$10 billion in 2027. Under the huge market, accelerating the pace of mass production and application of Micro LEDs has become a general trend. The full-color flexible Micro-LED developed by the Korea Research Institute is also a step in this process. In fact, this research is not easy. The full-color display technology of Micro LEDs is more difficult. Conventional red, green and blue LEDs usually cannot grow simultaneously on the same substrate. Therefore, most research mainly focuses on monochromatic displays, such as red light, blue-green light and ultraviolet. The structure, manufacturing process, device characteristics, etc. of monochromatic Micro-LED devices such as light cannot achieve high-level full-color display. Driven by market demand, full-color Micro LED displays and with the increasingly urgent demand for Micro-LED display devices, full-color Micro-LED device preparation technology has gradually become a research hotspot.

Achieving this problem at the technical level requires multiple tests. South Korea's research is a technical route plan that uses blue Micro-LEDs combined with quantum dot color conversion arrays. The preparation process of blue Micro-LEDs is mature and the cost is relatively low. Quantum dot color conversion technology only requires the overall manufacture of blue Micro-LED displays with extremely high pixel density, and converts some of its blue pixels into red and green respectively through a patterned quantum dot color conversion array to achieve full-color display. In addition to this technology, there are other and more attempts in the preparation of full-color Micro LEDs, including a new manufacturing technology project for ultra-small RGB stacked layers in South Korea in 2021, and full-color microdisplay of active matrix CMOS backplane drive technology produced by Silicon Valley manufacturers in the United States. This also fully demonstrates the continuous progress in technology of full-color Micro LEDs and people's expectations for them.

Full color display, the origin and role of perovskite

In Micro LED-related research, perovskites can often be seen, and substantial breakthroughs have been made at the research level. From an application perspective, at first, perovskites were not regarded as an existence that was not expected. Perovskites are chemical substances that can be used in the fabrication of LED light-emitting devices. New semiconductors such as metal halide calcium ore are widely considered to be inherently unstable, especially in LED applications where electric fields are relatively high. In previous research, most near-infrared perovskite LEDs always have the contradiction of too low efficiency at high brightness and too low brightness at high efficiency. How to maintain high efficiency and high stability while maintaining high brightness is an urgent problem to be solved in the field of perovskite LEDs, and it also restricts its commercial application.

In recent years, a number of related research results have shown that perovskite materials have no genetic defects in terms of stability. Some researchers even pointed out that achieving stable calciumite devices is not an impossible task. Long device life is expected to boost confidence in the calciumite LED field, as it has met the basic stability requirements of commercial OLEDs and some Micro LEDs.""""" In applications such as near-infrared display, communications and biology, perovskites also play a significant role. Although the technological breakthrough in perovskite LED screens has not yet reached the point of full commercialization, from the perspective of the application market, the urgent demand will inevitably accelerate the rapid implementation of related products and technologies.

At present, in terms of key technologies of Micro LED, some large companies such as Samsung and LG have strong technical professional monopoly power. For other screen companies in the market, it is not easy to enter this field. Although perovskites were previously considered to have fatal problems, with the continuous deepening of research, limitations have been overcome and a higher level has been achieved. Therefore, the role of perovskites in solving key technologies of Micro LEDs has changed. People are beginning to look forward to it, which is one of the reasons why the academic community likes this field so much in research.

Continuous breakthroughs in development and commercialization are just around the corner

In the LED display industry, the pursuit of product and technological innovation has never stopped. This can naturally be seen in generation after generation of butterfly products. Although from the perspective of product performance, Micro LEDs have low luminous efficiency in small size due to the influence of size effect, and the red light part in full-color displays is particularly prominent. Due to factors such as sapphire route wafer size and warping, the yield of Micro LED chips is low, so cost and production capacity are difficult to meet market expectations. It can be seen that with the continuous development of relevant research technologies, corresponding breakthroughs have been made in related materials that were not originally optimistic, which also shows the level of activity at this level. At present, in addition to the need for continuous breakthroughs in technology, there will also be more space waiting for development at the overall application level. For screen companies, in addition to actively paying attention to market and technology trends, they should also Actively deploy in advance research and development and production, and strengthen investment in technology research and development.

Micro-LED technology is considered to be the next generation of display technology in the consumer electronics field. Micro-LED displays have just begun to enter the field of consumer electronics, and there is still some time before this technology is widely popularized and applied. However, the characteristics it exhibits will soon be promoted in special application fields, and new functions based on Micro-LED display technology are also constantly being explored. Perhaps these new functions will bring a revolution to the future display field.

The development of technology has promoted the renewal and iteration of the industrial chain. It is foreseeable that with the presence of leading manufacturers and university scientific research institutions, Micro LEDs will become more and more popular in small and medium-sized display applications, promoting the further development of Micro LEDs and paving the way for the future of LED displays to move towards a broader market.