Hon Hai plans to build a Micro LED AR ecosystem

Recently, Jiang Zhixiong, general manager of Hon Hai's B business group and digital health, revealed that its AR glasses products are oriented to the consumer market and are expected to achieve mass production as soon as next year. In the future, Hon Hai also plans to combine wafer-level display technology with Micro LEDs to achieve comprehensive access from the technology side to the application side by building a complete ecosystem.

Coincidentally, in August this year, Goer also announced the acquisition of Micro LED companies to improve the layout of its AR glasses supply chain. As two well-known foundries, Hon Hai and Goer's layout of Micro LEDs will, on the one hand, promote the commercialization of Micro LEDs, and on the other hand, form a new competitive landscape and promote the upgrading of Micro LED AR glasses products.

Hon Hai Micro LED AR Plan Hon Hai and Nobel Optometry will cooperate this time, focusing on the fields of ophthalmology and optometry medicine. Jiang Zhixiong said that the cooperation not only laid the foundation for AR glasses in the medical field, but also paved the way for the development of the consumer market. However, the initially launched AR glasses products will not involve medical purposes, but will be aimed at the next generation of consumer-level human-computer interaction needs. The products are still in the pricing process. Jiang Zhixiong believes that near-eye display combined with eye tracking is the most promising human-computer interaction solution in the current AI era. Among them, wafer-level displays and Micro LEDs are the key points. Hon Hai will play an important role in the Micro LED supply chain and ecosystem. Its strategy will not only be limited to OEM, but to create a complete ecosystem from components and modules to systems and applications.

In December last year, Hon Hai Technology Group announced a partnership with Porotech to integrate Porotech's gallium nitride technology with Hon Hai's Micro LED wafer process technology to focus on the production of AR display chips and AR glasses. Hon Hai plans to establish an 8-inch Micro LED wafer process line in Taichung. It is expected to put into mass production in the fourth quarter of 2025, with a monthly production capacity target of 5 million 0.1-inch micro displays. In the SID in May this year, Porotech and Hon Hai jointly demonstrated one-stop AR solutions from materials, optical machines, optical modules, AR glasses to complete machine assembly and mass production. In addition, Porotech also demonstrated the new InGaN red LED product SpectraCore, which has a 5-fold increase in brightness compared to existing red light technology. The red light wavelength is stable, and has excellent thermal stability and reliability.

Hon Hai and Goer launched Micro LED. At the same time, Goer announced in August that it would spend 700 million yuan to acquire Micro LED companies. Unlike companies such as Meta and Apple, Hon Hai and Goer are both foundries. Currently, both are building Micro LED AR solutions and developing towards super suppliers of AR.

Goer's strategic focus is to build a technological ecosystem with leading brands. For example, its cooperation with Meta has extended from VR OEM to joint research and development of AR display technology, and has invested heavily in Plessey. Plessey's Micro LEDs are a key component of Meta's next-generation AR glasses. In the Xiaomi ecosystem, Goer has become the exclusive supplier of its glasses optical modules through an investment + technology export model.

The layout integration of the two major foundries marks a new stage in the commercialization of Micro LED AR glasses. In the long run, the focus of competition between the two will be on technology commercialization capabilities and cost control, the most critical of which is product yield and technology iteration speed.

It is worth mentioning that Porotech's Micro LED technology uses inorganic PoroGaN materials and DPT technology to achieve full-color display on a single LED chip; while Plessey's LEDs are made of gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on- Si), which is also a monolithic Micro LED manufacturing.