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Leading microLED technology expert for AR/VR displays, Plessey Semiconductor, along with its backplane partner, Jasper Display Corp (JDC), has announced significant progress in development of monolithic microLED displays. Following a continued partnership with JDC including an extensive capital investment in a complete tool set-enabling successful wafer to wafer bonding, Plessey has succeeded in wafer level bonding of its GaN-on-Silicon monolithic microLED wafers with JDC’s eSP70 silicon patented backplane technology, resulting in microLED displays that contain addressable LEDs.
Wafer level bonding poses significant technical challenges and has not previously been achieved between a GaN-on-Silicon LED wafers and a high-density CMOS backplanes.
Plessey initially achieved the world’s first mechanically successful wafer to wafer bond in early April 2019. This significant success has now been followed by a fully functional, electrical and mechanical bond, resulting in a fully operational microLED display. Plessey’s microLED display features an array of 1920×1080 (FHD) current-driven monochrome pixels on a pitch of 8 microns. Each display requires more than two million individual electrical bonds to connect the microLED pixels to the controlling backplane. The JDC backplane provides independent 10-bit single color control of each pixel – Bonding a complete LED wafer to a CMOS backplane wafer, incorporates over 100 million micro level bonds between the wafers.
According to Dr Wei Sin Tan, Director of Epitaxy and Advanced Product Development at Plessey, this is a momentous milestone in the development of a monolithic microLED display technology. To the best of Plessey’s knowledge this is truly a WORLD FIRST and this is what the industry has been waiting for and opens up a new market for microLED emissive display applications.
According to JDC’s VP Marketing and Product Management, T.I. Lin, Plessey’s monolithic microLED array is a great match to JDC’s high-density silicon backplane. The JD27E series demonstrates JDC’s ability to deliver what Plessey and the wider industry has been waiting for – silicon backplanes that have been designed with their microLED display requirements in mind.
Plessey, at SID Display Week 2019, unveiled its breakthrough cutting-edge microLED technology and demonstrated why its scalable and repeatable GaN-on-Silicon monolithic process is the only solution for next-generation augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) display products, head-up/head-mounted (HUD/HMDs), smartphones and other microLED based display applications.