MicroLED Has ‘Great Promise’ for Smartwatches, but Hurdles Abound, DSCC Says

MicroLED has “great promise” as a display technology, “but it’s going to take a while for it to achieve volume production,” Bob O’Brien, president of Display Supply Chain Consultants, told an LEDs Magazine webinar Thursday. MicroLED is expected to have three to four times the power efficiency of OLED, he said. “For portable displays, this is especially important,” he said. MicroLED’s peak-brightness performance also will give it a big advantage over OLED in a “TV-like application,” he said. But bringing microLED displays to market is “a big challenge,” he said. Achieving the “chip transfer from an LED wafer onto a backplate” is among the biggest hurdles to commercializing the technology, he said. Smartwatches are likely to be the first commercial applications of microLED displays, he said. That’s where “you can leverage that power consumption value into a significantly better device,” he said.