TECH FOCUS DISPLAYS
MicroLED chips on 300mm silicon wafers pave way for mass production
Aledia brings making at least 24 million specialist wafers a year into sharp focus
F
rench start-up Aledia has manufactured microLED chips produced on 300mm
(12 inch) silicon wafers, which the company says opens up the potential for mass-producing microLED displays with commercially available processes and equipment. The company, which
developed its technology on 200mm (8 inch) silicon wafers over the past eight years, will produce the chips on both 200 and 300mm wafers. The larger wafers provide better economic payoff and cost-effective integration with smaller-node electronics, which are only available on 300mm silicon wafers. Aledia was spun out of CEA-Leti, a French research institute pioneering micro- and nanotechnologies, in 2012, and the work on 300mm wafers has been performed by combined Aledia and CEA-Leti teams. ‘We believe producing
microLEDs on large-area 300mm silicon wafers is a world first, and opens this technology to huge potential-volume- manufacturing capabilities,’ said Giorgio Anania, Aledia co-founder and CEO. ‘The larger size allows 60 to 100 smartphone displays to be made on a single 300mm wafer, versus approximately four-to-six using the present LED industry-standard, 4-inch sapphire substrate. Thanks to Aledia’s unique nanowire LED technology (3D LED), this can be done with commercially available processes and equipment, since it uses standard-thickness (780µm) silicon wafers.’
40 Electro Optics March 2021
Samsung’s microLED display, The Wall, has been demonstrated at shows such as CES, but is not yet available commercially
MicroLEDs versus OLED displays MicroLEDs are anticipated to be the next big display consumer technology, competing with organic LEDs (OLEDs). Both OLEDs and microLEDs are ‘emissive technologies’, creating pictures from arrays of shining LED pixels. This differs from the best- established liquid crystal displays (LCDs), where the images formed must be
illuminated by emission from behind by a backlight, typically an LED-powered one. However, OLEDs’ brightness and efficiency in turning electricity into light are limited. MicroLEDs bring the possibility of high-resolution emissive displays with the high efficiencies typical of LEDs, because microLEDs are 20 x 20µm compared to 200 x 200µm for LEDs. MicroLED prototypes have already demonstrated
power consumption as low as 10 per cent that of an LCD display, and half that of an OLED panel. Traditional planar 2D
microLEDs are produced by depositing flat layers of gallium-nitride (GaN) crystal on sapphire wafers of 100 to 150mm diameter (4-6 inches), with the majority of production today being on 100mm (4-inch) wafers. Aledia’s microLED technology grows GaN
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