Zhaochi Jingxian: Four years of hard work, leading the road of COB technological innovation

In the long river of scientific and technological development, time is like a precise ruler, and technology is the core axis that drives progress. Since its establishment in February 2021, Zhaochi Crystal Display has left a solid footprint in the LED display field for four years.
Over the past four years, Zhaochi Crystal Display has firmly anchored COB packaging technology, and with its continuous innovation power, it has set off a profound technological revolution. It took the lead in successfully commercializing Mini LED direct display technology. It is like a huge stone invested in a calm lake, arousing thousands of waves, effectively driving the upgrade and iteration of indoor small-pitch market display technology, and opening up a new world for Mini/Micro LED ultra-high definition display technology. During the past four years, Zhaochi Jingxian has been like a leader, leading and promoting the continuous growth of COB technology. Now, let us look back on this magnificent journey together and deeply experience the surging innovation power behind the growth of COB technology and the surging wave of industry change.
1. Iteration and evolution of packaging technology driven by spacing shrinkage
Before 1993, LED displays were still in the initial stage of red and green two-color display. At that time, with its wide viewing angle, high brightness and bright colors, it was mainly used in relatively simple display scenes such as traffic signals and signs, playing the role of basic information display. In 1993, Shuji Nakamura successfully invented blue LED. This breakthrough achievement is like lighting up a bright lamp, leading LED displays to officially enter the era of full-color display. However, LED displays really ushered in the opportunity for large-scale application after the birth of SMD packaging technology in 2001. It can be said that the emergence of blue LEDs has greatly optimized the display effect of the screen and made the picture more vivid and realistic; and the advent of SMD packaging technology has significantly improved the performance of the LED display screen, laying a solid foundation for its wide application. After these two major technological upgrades, the LED industry seems to have wings and quickly entered the track of rapid development.
The key turning point for LED displays from outdoor to indoor appeared after the birth of small-pitch products. In 2010, Liard successfully developed P2.5 small-pitch products, taking the lead in taking a critical step; in 2012, Zhou Ming and other companies also successfully achieved mass production of small-pitch LED displays. Since then, LED small-pitch products have ushered in a golden age of development, and the limitations of market space have been continuously exceeded. To this day, shrinking the spacing is still a goal that the industry pursues unremittingly. This trend, like a catalyst, has prompted the industry to pay more attention to the iteration of packaging technology and carry out in-depth exploration.

Specifically, before 2001, LED displays mainly used in-line packaging (DIP). This is the earliest packaging technology successfully developed and put on the market. It has a simple structure and relatively low cost. However, it also has obvious drawbacks. It is large in size and not compact enough, which limits its application scope to a certain extent. The SMD packaging technology that was introduced later was like a bright star, greatly reducing the size and weight of the LED and being able to withstand large currents. Once launched, it quickly won the favor of the market. Up to now, SMD packaging technology still occupies a wide application space in markets above P1.5 due to its many advantages such as high maturity, low cost, complete industrial chain, high color consistency and convenient maintenance.
However, SMD is a discrete device, and each pixel needs to be packaged separately before being mounted. This characteristic results in its relatively weak protection, which is prone to knocking and dropping the lamp. At the same time, it also has poor waterproof, moisture-proof and dustproof properties. Especially after the rise of Mini LEDs, SMD has encountered many difficulties in breaking through the bottleneck of point spacing, and the market is urgently calling for new packaging technology routes. After years of continuous development, the LED display industry has formed an industrial pattern in which traditional discrete SMD, MIP, COB and other technical routes coexist. Among them, the rapid rise of COB technology in recent years has become the focus of industry attention and attracted a lot of attention.
2. The wind starts at the end of Qingping: Jingxian has led COB in four years
COB technology was born in 2012. As an integrated packaging technology, it has natural advantages in pitch miniaturization. However, due to its extremely high technical difficulty and many obstacles in breaking through key problems such as yield and ink consistency, COB is still only used in the high-end display field after years of development, and it is faced with widespread commercialization. There are many challenges. In February 2021, Zhaochi Group had a keen insight into the potential of COB technology and decisively focused on this technology to establish Zhaochi Jingxian. This move was like a timely rain, bringing a major turning point to the development of COB technology.
In fact, looking at the time point of 2021, COB technology is facing many doubts. From the perspective of initial investment, the COB process places extremely high requirements on production equipment and technical accuracy. Moreover, due to the huge differences between its production process and traditional SMD processes, companies need to re-purchase die bonders, printers, AOI testing equipment, etc. that can meet the needs of precision manufacturing. This not only requires companies to have firm confidence and determination in COB's technical route, but also requires companies to have strong financial strength to support companies to overcome the short-term pressure caused by low output in the early stage of COB's development. Therefore, before Zhaochi Group resolutely entered the game, most companies in the industry took a wait-and-see attitude towards this technology, resulting in the development of COB technology being tepid.
From the perspective of production and manufacturing, COB has long suffered from low through-through yields, and there are also many challenges in terms of display effects. This made early COB products only applicable to high-end fields, and the market space was always difficult to effectively open up. Some industry insiders even had doubts about the sustainable development capabilities of COB technology. In addition, the most critical thing is that COB technology blurs the originally clear division of labor and boundaries of the LED display upstream and downstream industrial chain, resulting in differences between upstream and downstream companies in the division of labor and benefit distribution in certain links. At the same time, COB technology also requires upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain to maintain in-depth collaborative innovation and information exchange. These factors have restricted the development pace of the COB industry to a certain extent.
After Zhaochi Group announced the establishment of Zhaochi Jingxian in 2021, it has successfully built strong core competitiveness by relying on process innovation, technological innovation, intelligent manufacturing, scale advantages and industrial chain synergy advantages, and cleared the many obstacles on the development path of COB one by one., laying a solid foundation for COB to continue to expand its market space. Among them, Zhaochi Jingxian's most commendable advantage is its industrial chain synergy advantage. As mentioned above, the COB model reshapes the supply relationship of the industrial chain. Zhaochi Jingxian and Zhaochi Semiconductor are both under the Zhaochi Group, and Zhaochi Semiconductor's technical strength and production capacity in the field of LED chips rank among the top in the industry. This vertically integrated layout enables Zhaochi Crystal Display to fully integrate the group's internal resources and technological advantages in the development process of COB technology and achieve deep vertical integration of the industrial chain. This not only improves its technological innovation capabilities, but also helps it expand production capacity, reduce costs, and further expand market application areas. This strong synergy provides a steady stream of power for Zhaochi Crystal Display's rapid development in the field of COB technology.
In terms of capacity construction, the number of automated production lines of Zhaochi Jingxian will be 100 in 2021; in November 2022, the Nanchang base will be officially put into operation, and the number of production lines will be expanded to 700; from 2023 to 2024, the production lines will further increase to 1600. As of March 2025, Zhaochi Jingxian's production capacity has soared to 30000 ㎡/month, showing an astonishing development speed. In terms of technological innovation, Zhaochi Jingxian deeply integrated innovative concepts into product design and process optimization, successfully overcoming the problems of low through-pass yield and poor ink consistency that have long been criticized by the industry in COB history, and significantly improved Product quality and performance.""

Zhaochi Group's strong investment and firm promotion of COB technology is like putting a catfish in a calm lake, triggering a strong catfish effect. This not only stimulated the enthusiasm and activity of peers for innovation in COB display technology, but also injected new vitality into the development of the entire LED display industry. Compared with 2021, the current COB display has achieved a qualitative leap in terms of market recognition, number of practitioners, production capacity, technology and application scenarios. Zhaochi Jingxian's strategic layout for COB displays has prompted COB displays to successfully enter a virtuous cycle of scale expansion-cost reduction-demand explosion-scale expansion, and has become an important catalyst for the accelerated maturity of COB technology."" From the perspective of market penetration, COB's penetration rate in multiple point-spacing segments will increase significantly in 2024. The market is the touchstone for testing technology. Under the guidance and witness of Zhaochi Jingxian, COB technology has fully proved its advantages and sustainable development capabilities. In the long run, COB technology will continue to become a core hot spot in the Mini/Micro LED industry, leading the industry to continue to develop forward.

3. The past: leading and witnessing the future: leading the way again
The four years from 2021 to 2025 are four years in which Zhaochi Crystal Display and COB technology accompany each other, grow together, and achieve each other. In the past four years, COB technology has achieved a magnificent transformation from the initial neglect of interest to now being able to keep pace with SMD and MIP through continuous technology iteration, production capacity expansion and cost performance improvement; and Zhaochi Jingxian has also faced many doubts since its inception and gradually grew into an industry benchmark in the COB field. As the world's largest COB panel factory, Zhaochi Crystal Display has successfully promoted COB technology from the embryonic stage of the industry to a broad blue ocean of commercial development, fully demonstrating to the entire LED industry the strong strength and huge potential of COB technology in the era of Mini/Micro LED ultra-high definition display. Looking to the future, Zhaochi Jingxian will continue to be at the forefront, lead the continuous innovation and development of COB technology, create more exciting possibilities for the LED display industry, and continue to write a more glorious chapter.​