Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Apple's Vision Pro, released in June this year, can be said to refresh the ceiling of the XR headset experience.

Although it is not yet available, judging from the shocking feedback of the live experience of the media and Vision Pro's own stacking and innovative technology, the ceiling is not an exaggeration.

The Vision Pro contains many top technologies, but the most important of them is the two Micro OLED screens supplied by Sony.

Photo from: the two screens on Apple's official website are both 1.42in, with more than 23 million pixels and a pixel density of 3386ppi, which costs about $700and accounts for about 46% of the total BOM cost.

Photo from: the media that have experienced Vision Pro in Apple's press conference all affirmed the display effect of these two screens. The screen display effect can be said to be the soul of the XR headset, while the Vision Pro screen can not see pixels, almost the clarity of the world with the naked eye, using Apple's concept is "the video screen of the XR era."

Behind all this, these two pieces of Micro OLED are undoubtedly the greatest contributors.

When it comes to Micro OLED, many students may confuse it with another kind of screen, which is Micro LED. There is only one letter difference between the two, but it is a completely different screen technology.

However, Micro LED is also an ideal screen technology for XR devices. So why did Apple choose Micro OLED, what's the difference between it and Micro LED, and which technology solution is the ultimate choice for XR devices?

Micro OLED, use the technology of making chips to build screens. Let's talk about Micro OLED first. Friends who follow the screen will know that OLED screen, as the name implies, Micro OLED is "tiny OLED". Like OLED, it is based on organic light-emitting diodes, without backlight, pixel self-luminous, and has the advantages of high contrast, high color gamut, high response speed and thin.

Compared with OLED, the main feature of Micro OLED is that it uses monocrystalline silicon as substrate and uses standard CMOS process to fabricate driving circuit on monocrystalline silicon substrate.

CMOS technology is mainly used in lithography process, CMP process and so on. Speaking of which, I believe you can understand that this is the technology for making chips.

Yes, Micro OLED is to directly integrate the driving circuit of the screen into the chip-level silicon substrate, and then prepare an organic light-emitting layer on it. Because of the chip-making technology, not only the single pixel is very small, but also the pixel spacing can reach the micron level, so the pixel density of the whole screen can reach more than 3000 ppi that ordinary OLED can not reach.

Photo from: Sony's official website, coupled with the advantages of light and short screen, low power consumption and display effect, compared with other materials such as LCD, Fast-LCD, Amoled, Micro OLED is currently the most suitable for XR devices, which is why Apple does not use it.

Before Apple's Vision Pro, there were already several XR devices with Micro OLED screens on the market, such as Huawei's Vision Glass, Nreal Air, Rokid Air upgraded version, Thunderbird smart glasses vanguard version, etc., but generally speaking, Micro OLED's market share in XR head display is still very low, not to the level of mass production. This is also because Micro OLED uses semiconductor technology, which itself is very difficult to manufacture, patent barriers and cost, and it is extremely rare to customize extreme stacking and innovative screens like Apple's Vision Pro.

Photo from: Huawei's official website, however, with Apple's lead, there should be a wave of MicroOLED penetration into XR devices. According to DSCC, a consultancy for the display panel industry, global MicroOLED sales will exceed $1.3 billion in 2023 and double to more than $2.6 billion in 2024.

In the Micro OLED industry, at present, the enterprises that can develop and produce Micro OLED are mainly concentrated in Europe and the United States, including eMagin in the United States, Micro Emissive Displays (MED) in the United Kingdom, Fraunhofer IPMS research institutions in Germany, Micro OLED in France, Sony in Japan, and so on. Domestic progress in this area is also relatively rapid, mainly Ored, BOE, Vision Technology, Qingyue Technology and so on.

Photo from: Sony's official website, Sony can be said to be the leader in the Micro OLED industry, they began to develop this technology in 2009, and in 2011 they have used the first generation of Micro OLED screens in the camera viewfinder.

Micro LED, not only the ultimate solution of XR, we introduced Micro OLED before. If the popularity of Micro OLED on XR devices is something that will happen soon, then Micro LED may be the future that the whole industry is looking forward to.

We know that the traditional LED screen needs backlight, that is, the light emitting diode is used as the light source, but if the light source of this backlight is small enough, the screen can get better color performance, dynamic range, contrast and so on.

Following this idea, it turns out that there may be dozens of LED lights on a LED screen, but later thousands, tens of thousands or even more can be put into it. This is the Mini-LED screen that we often hear.

And if on this basis, the LED lamp continues to shrink and become more, so that each lamp bead can act as a pixel, can be driven to light separately, the pixel distance is in the micron order of magnitude, then the LED screen has a qualitative change, because it also has the characteristics of self-luminescence, a bit like OLED, this is Micro LED.

Because Micro LED uses inorganic light-emitting materials, it can avoid OLED oxidation, aging, screen burning and other problems, and improve the life of the display. At the same time, its theoretical full-color brightness can reach 100000nit, but its power consumption is 90% lower than that of OLED screens. In addition, Micro LED is not only better than OLED in contrast, color gamut and corresponding speed, but also better than Micro OLED.

In this regard, domestic Anxin Securities and other institutions have made a comparison of various performance indicators of Fast-LCD, Micro OLED and Micro LED. Here CTOnews.com collates them for reference.

Data from: star Wealth, Anxin Securities Research Center generally speaking, Micro LED in color display, pixel self-illumination, brightness, life, power consumption compared with other existing screen display technology has advantages, almost a perfect display technology, therefore, in the future it can not only become the ultimate solution for XR devices, but also become the best choice for mobile phones, computers, televisions and other terminal display screens.

Maybe some students are about to ask, since Micro LED is so good, why didn't Apple use Micro LED this time for Vision Pro?

The answer, of course, is the same old question: there are no conditions for commercial mass production.

The lack of commercial mass production here refers to the mass production of full-color and full-size Micro LED on mobile phones, PC, XR, televisions and other equipment. In fact, for AR, VR devices need small-size Micro LED screen, there are also large-scale mass production, but only a single green light, but not full color.

In addition, there are very few manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, that can ship large-size Micro LED in large quantities, but these screens are mainly large commercial splicing screens or large-size home televisions, which can not meet the standards of consumer-grade intelligent terminals in terms of pixel size and pixel spacing.

Samsung has a 110super-large screen TV that uses Micro LED screen. The picture shows that Samsung's official website is really suitable for mass production of Micro LED screens in a wide range of consumer terminals, and there are still many problems to be solved.

Photo from: playnitride official website, if we simply think of Micro LED as tens of thousands, millions of small light beads on a very small chip.

Then the first step of its production is to grow miniature LED grains on the wafers, and there are three kinds of such grains, which are RGB grains of different colors.

Photo from: playnitride official website then need to make LED drive circuit on another substrate, which can be silicon substrate, glass substrate or even flexible material substrate.

The third step is to separate the micro-LED grains grown in the first step from the wafer to the substrate with driving circuit. This is the most difficult step, the difficulty is that there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of LED grains, and there is more than one kind, which needs to be transferred to the driver circuit substrate at one time, and every LED grain has to accurately align the position on the circuit, this process has to be very fast, you know, the target circuit substrate itself is also very small.

Photo from: playnitride official website this process, called massive transfer, can be seen that this is a very complex and high-precision operation, and has almost abnormal yield requirements, such as 1 million pixels, there can only be one bad, the yield is as high as 99.9999%.

If the mass transfer is successful, the next step is to encapsulate the display panel and finally complete the production of a Micro LED display.

It can be said that the huge transfer is the main obstacle affecting the commercial mass production of Micro LED at present. Of course, in addition to the huge transfer, Micro LED still has many hurdles to cross if it wants to achieve large-scale mass production. For example, the mass production of Micro LED chips must have advanced high-precision micro-equipment, and at the same time, the requirements for the sanitary environment and production efficiency of the workshop are extremely high. How to promote the maturity of production line capacity is a problem. In addition, mass production requires a large amount of raw materials to be stored, which is also a test for the strength of manufacturers.

Although there are still some difficulties in commercial mass production at present, Micro LED is still regarded by the whole industry as the real next generation display technology and the darling of the global capital market for a long time because of its almost perfect performance in all aspects.

According to the information given by the International third Generation Semiconductor Forum, the global investment in Micro LED has exceeded 100 billion yuan since 2020, including technology giants such as Apple and Google.

For example, Apple bought Micro LED startup LuxVue as early as 2014, and according to Nippon Keizai Shimbun, they have spent more than $1 billion on Micro LED research and development over the past decade, and it has also been reported that Apple has expanded its plant in Longtan, Taoyuan, Taiwan, to develop Micro LED.

Meta subsidiary Oculus acquired InfiniLED derived from Tyndall National Institute in Ireland and Cork University in Ireland in 2016, while Google invested in Micro LED maker Glo the following year and invested in Mojo Vision in 2019.

In 2018 and 2020, screen and semiconductor giants including Samsung, Crystal Power and Youda also invested in Micro LED developer PlayNitride.

On the domestic side, there were 9 financing in the primary market in Micro LED in 2021 and 10 in 2022, including Alibaba, BYD, Xiaomi and Geely.

Driven by the continuous investment of capital and the continuous iterative technology of science and technology enterprises, it is believed that the problem of commercialization of Micro LED will be solved eventually.

In fact, according to the latest forecast of DSCC, the global Micro LED display market will reach 1.38 billion US dollars by 2027, and Micro LED is expected to be commercialized in the next 5-8 years.

The conclusion reviews the evolution process of the display technology scheme of XR products. The early equipment took AMOLED as the standard for high-end products, and then Fast-LCD appeared, which greatly increased the screen refresh rate and became the mainstream from 2018 to the present by virtue of low cost, while Mini-LED backlight technology further enhanced it, but there are also cases of high technical difficulty and shadow in the picture.

In the foreseeable future, Micro OLED will become the mainstream of XR devices, but before its large-scale commercial use, Mini-LED backlit Fast LCD may become the priority transition solution.

Photo from: if Apple's official website looks further, Micro LED, as a hexagonal warrior, will open the screen to show the real next era, not just XR devices, but can be extended to almost any device with a screen.

Just imagine, in the future, our mobile phone screens will also be Micro LED screens, which can present a more realistic and perfect picture than the current OLED screen, and in terms of non-burning screen, long life, and lower power consumption, the mobile phone will be able to make it lighter and thinner, which is really something to look forward to.

Related reading: "[XR floating World painting 2] the competition in the AR industry has intensified, and there are hidden worries under Rokid opportunities."

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.