Who is stopping the "king of future display" Micro LED from reaching the top! The answer is unique and certain! That is, the cost of price.
It is reported that the average price of 100-inch Micro/Mini LED direct display large screen or conference all-in-one machine products is 10 times that of LCD 100-inch display products. In terms of the price of high-end technology 100-inch products with high premiums such as Samsung, Micro LED is 30-50 times that of liquid crystal products.
The price is exorbitant, apparently outpacing the increase in display performance. Therefore, more Micro LED all-in-one products can only pursue the application size far beyond the upper limit of the LCD display, and open up a living space in the market above 150 inches - however, the larger the size, the smaller the market size and future potential of the demand. Micro LED will inevitably "sooner or later face the real mainstream all-in-one application scenario of 100 inches", that is, face the "price range" competition of liquid crystal display.
Let the cost fall, Samsung, AUO draw a big pie
Promote the reduction of costs and prices, so that Micro LED displays can have higher sales. According to incomplete data, in the two years of 2022-2023, the sales volume of domestic Micro LED all-in-one machines and other products will not be about 10,000 units (household and commercial total); This is a huge difference from the expected total sales of LCD TVs and LCD commercial displays of 75 inches and above in the domestic market of more than 10 million units in 2024.
As one of the core leaders of Micro LED color TV technology,Samsung is reported by the media that the annual sales of Micro LED color TV are only 100 units。
For the reason for the lack of sales,Just look at the price of Samsung products:SamsungMicro LED TV has cover76inch、89inch、101inch、110inch、114Inch and other sizes,The price is about 650,000 yuan、750,000 yuan、900,000 yuan、1.05 million yuan、1.25 million yuan - in the same period,The cheapest 100-inch LCD TV is only priced at 8999 yuan!
Recently, the media reported that Samsung has launched a project to reduce the cost of Micro LED TV, with the goal of reducing production costs to 1/10 of the current level in the next 2-3 years. This goal will reduce the price of Samsung's current Micro LED color TV to 5-100,000 yuan. It is still much higher than the price of LCD TVs of the same size, but it can also be "compared" with high-end LCD TVs.
As an important upstream partner of Samsung's Micro LED display products, AUO's statement is more aggressive. Peng Shuanglang, Chairman of AUO, made it clear at the shareholders' meeting that AUO is currently making efforts to reduce the cost of Micro LED, and it is expected that in 5 years, the cost of Micro LED will be the same as that of OLED panels. If AUO means that the cost of Micro LED in 5 years is comparable to the cost of OLED of the same size today, from the perspective of selling price, its price may only be 3-5 times that of today's LCD TVs of the same size. Its target is 90% higher than Samsung's price reduction.
For the cost reduction of Micro LED display, the good news is that the current LCD display products are already at the "floor price", and there is almost no room for further price decline. That is, in the future, the price of Micro LED will be reduced, the price of liquid crystal will be stable, and even the price of small and medium-sized sizes will rise slightly with CPI. This is very beneficial for Micro LED to continue to close the price gap between the two.
To control costs, the key to Micro LED is to make a fuss about "improving efficiency".
In terms of cost control of micro LED displays, why should AUO compare with OLED? The important point is that AUO's current main products developed and supplied to Samsung are based on current-driven AM TFT glass substrate products similar to OLED displays. That is, from the perspective of substrates, this kind of Micro LED products and OLEDs have almost the same industrial chain, and they will inevitably have the same substrate cost in the future. Compared with LCD, the latter is a voltage-driven AM TFT substrate (which is cheaper).
In addition to the cost of the substrate, Micro LED crystal chip and integrated packaging technology are its unique industrial chain links, and they are also one of the two parts with the highest cost. It can be basically considered that these two parts account for seventy percent or even higher of the inherent cost of the current Micro LED display.
In the future, with the improvement of LED luminous efficiency, the cutting size of Micro LED can be further reduced. A 50% reduction in linear size means a 75% increase in the number of crystal particles that can be produced per unit of wafer. The industry expects that the crystal size of Micro LED is eager to move from 34×58 microns at this stage to 15×30 microns of 20×40 microns or even smaller. On the other hand, the current mainstream MIP package Micro LED size is generally about 26×50 microns, and there is room for further shrinkage in the future. LG's next-generation 136-inch microLED display in 2024 uses 27-micron × 16-micron LED chips. From a technical point of view, the industry has solved the problem of efficient and stable operation of LED crystals of about 5 microns, and corresponding and smaller size products are applied to silicon-based Micro LED displays and AR products.
Integrated packaging technology is currently the biggest bottleneck in the mass application of Micro LED. According to the media's analysis of some smart watches with Micro LED displays, the integrated packaging link may account for more than 40% of the cost of today's Micro LED display products.
Among them, the immaturity of mass transfer technology, the average efficiency and speed, the low yield and high rejection rate, the large workload of detection and repair, and the high difficulty are the main difficulties in the integration and packaging of Micro LED products. It can be said that further breakthroughs in the reliability and efficiency of mass transfer are the key to the further development of the industry. In this regard, the Micro LED industry is developing a new generation of process routes with MIP technology as the core:
That is, the traditional AM TFT, PM glass-based, PCB board Micro LED packaging, including COB technology, etc., are all directly manipulated LED crystals. LED crystals are too small in size, large in number, and fragile in themselves, which are the key to the efficiency and reliability of mass transfer. In the MIP technology process, the LED crystal is first packaged into RGB three-core lamp beads with a larger size, such as 200 microns and 400 microns, and then the display module integration is carried out in the mass process. In the display module link, there is no size bottleneck, the quantity bottleneck is also reduced by two-thirds, and the solidity of the lamp bead integration is also higher.
In addition, the RGB three-core integrated lamp bead packaging that is the first to be packaged by MIP packaging does not require a repair process - because a single product only integrates at least three chips, and the impact of material costs directly scrapped if there is a problem is limited. At the same time, the three-core integration does not require the "6 9s" yield required by a large number of LED crystal cores for one-time integration, but only needs the yield of 4-5 9s. For the process of further integration of MIP lamp beads into display modules, the difficulty of mass transfer is reduced, the yield is improved, and the detectability and repair are also greatly improved. And because it is directly an RGB lamp bead, only 5 9s are needed for a large reduction in workload.
That is, MIP technology reduces the difficulty of the integrated packaging link of Micro LED by 1-2 orders of magnitude as a whole. This contributes to mass production, mass application, and cost reduction. Of course, the MIP Micro LED technology route also has its drawbacks: first of all, it is not suitable for smaller high-density display products, and the minimum size of the current mass-produced MIP lamp beads is 0202, and the minimum is only compatible with P0.3X pixel pitch products - however, this is enough to meet the 4K display needs of products such as 75-inch all-in-one computers. Secondly, MIP reduces the difficulty of mass transfer (reduces costs), but increases the links in the industrial chain (increases costs), and how to balance the impact of the two on costs requires large-scale practice to finally clarify. In terms of the market, some people in the industry expect that the shipment volume of MIP technology Micro LED display in the domestic market in 2024 will increase by about 5 times year-on-year.
In addition, for Micro LED displays, especially 4K-level displays, the cost of driver chips cannot be ignored. Because the higher the definition and the more pixels, the greater the pressure on the driver chip: either a large Micro LED screen uses more driver chips, or the driving capacity of a single core of the driver chip is greatly increased - for example, the number of channels is increased from 12 to 48.
In terms of driver solutions, in addition to PM driver and AM driver technology routes, the industry is also developing the technology of integrating RGB Micro LED light-emitting chips and a driver chip (Micro IC) into a pixel device (i.e., optical drive integrated architecture). The processes that drive chip manufacturing are also moving to the nanometer level of 100 nanometers or even lower, and the packaging structure is progressing from hundreds of microns to tens of microns, which can increase the number of wafers per unit of output. In addition, the dead pixel isolation function of the driver chip will also be one of the standard configurations of Micro LED displays in the future.
For the cost control of Micro LED displays, in addition to backplanes, LED crystals, driver chips and integrated packaging technology, scale is another important factor: reducing costs is to increase scale, and increasing scale is conducive to further cost reduction. The first is the issue of equal sharing of R&D and production line construction costs in the early stage; Secondly, a higher industry scale helps to fully compete and accelerate the R&D iteration of processes, equipment, and technologies. In the industry's existing investment scale from equipment, materials, R&D innovation to production capacity, the mainland occupies an absolute advantage in the global market, if you add the investment in mainland Taiwan, basically the Micro LED display industry chain is currently under the dominant pattern of mainland enterprises. And in the past five years, the mainland alone has accumulated nearly 200 billion yuan in investment, has been completed and planned Micro LED related projects.
The Micro LED display industry is leapfrogging the historical stage from having nothing to better
Samsung began to take the initiative to shout price cuts, and the reduction target is 90%, so aren't the current high-priced products "not worth it at all"? Industry insiders said that Samsung's ability to act like this shows the urgency of Micro LED to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and on the other hand, it also shows that Samsung's "psychology has some confidence" - that is, the industry has reached a new stage to solve the cost problem.
The industry expects that the next three years will be a critical period for Micro LED to move from "technical theory-led" to "easy to use and landing" led by engineering and market practice. It is also the first round of "big wave" period of the outbreak of the industrial chain. Enterprises in the corresponding industries should be prepared for "passionate surfing".