Six Years of MicroLED: A Promising Display Technology Yet to Take Off

Six years ago, a promising display technology called MicroLED, or microled, emerged, poised to overtake the current state-of-the-art OLED. A report even suggested that Apple invested around $3 billion into MicroLED with the aim of debuting it in a new Apple Watch. This made sense as MicroLED displays offer crucial advantages over OLED, such as longer lifespan, resistance to burn-in, and the ability to get much brighter while maintaining self-lighting pixels and those inky dark black levels.

However, fast forward to today, and MicroLED displays are barely anywhere to be seen. What gives?

The Difficulties of Manufacturing MicroLED Displays

MicroLED is very difficult to manufacture. Not only do you have to place the sub-pixels onto the display one at a time, but if one of those sub-pixels ends up being dead, you have to take it off and put a new one in its place. This can be tough to do without damaging nearby pixels, and once this happens enough, you’ve suddenly got a dud of a product.

A related issue is just how small the pixels need to be. Although you can build a MicroLED display with big pixels, the wafers upon which the LEDs are printed are extremely expensive. To make MicroLED cost-effective, you need to be able to make multiple displays from a single wafer, meaning smaller pixels. However, making pixels that small is also quite challenging, as some pixels are more likely to come out defective, and shrinking them down also makes them much less efficient.

For example, a MicroLED-sized blue LED is only about 40% efficient, but even that is nothing compared to red, which is notoriously inefficient, with around 1% efficiency. This means a lot of energy and heat are generated.

Potential Solutions for MicroLED’s Challenges

The industry is looking at ways to fix these problems. One potential solution is to combine Quantum dots, which emit specific colors of light according to their size, with MicroLEDs to make them brighter. However, this is tricky because the number of photons coming out of the LEDs is often higher than Quantum dots can effectively handle.

Despite the fact that MicroLED can get brighter than OLED, OLED technology, partly with the help of Quantum dots, has evolved to the point where brightness isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be. This is important for HDR, and there are now OLED TVs that can hit 3,000 nits of brightness, which is plenty bright for most applications.

The Current State of MicroLED

So where exactly does that leave MicroLED? It did look like the initial advantage of MicroLED, namely better efficiency and enhanced brightness, would make it good for something like a smartwatch, which you’d often be looking at in bright sunlight. Apple thought the same, which is why they invested billions into MicroLED production for the Apple Watch. However, they canceled these plans in early 2024 due to the difficulties mentioned above and the fact that higher-end watch displays are pretty good in terms of brightness and battery life. The current Apple Watch uses OLED.

Nanosys, a major developer of MicroLED technology, likewise sold off their MicroLED Fab to a startup that isn’t even going to be using it to make displays. Instead, they’re going to use MicroLEDs for multi-terabit interconnects, essentially using them for optical communication, which is pretty cool in its own right but a far cry from the original vision of MicroLED being the future of TVs, monitors, and watch displays.

With OLED’s development looking bright and the emergence of competing technologies like QEL or QDEL, which promise many of the benefits of MicroLED without the ridiculous manufacturing problems, MicroLED might end up only being a thing in applications that we now consider niche. For example, they might end up powering augmented reality glasses due to their high brightness, with levels like 3 million nits. However, it’s far from a sure thing.

In the meantime, we do at least have a cool MicroLED concept laptop, but it’s unclear why you would want everyone being able to see what you’re looking at from the other side of the screen.

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