Is The Glass Substrate The Help Of The Evolution Of Mini / Micro LED Display?

Since the development of the industry, mini / micro LED display has moved from concept to reality. This year, mini LED display products successfully achieved mass production and entered the commercial field. However, the technological R & D, innovation and upgrading of mini LED display products are still ongoing. As an important technical optimization point, the attention of panel technology remains high. BOE, TCL Huaxing and other panel manufacturers have increased the R & D of mini LED panel technology.

Dilemma under technological innovation

In recent years, the LED display industry is undergoing some technological innovation. The spacing of LED displays is becoming smaller and smaller, gradually entering the era of micro spacing, and the mini / micro LED display market has entered an explosive period. Subsequently, the competition in the HD display market is particularly fierce and has entered a white hot. Screen enterprises have launched new products to seize the display market by improving technology and solving problems. It can be seen from the information disclosed in the major press releases that large manufacturers have arranged the production chain of mini / micro LED display products one after another, hoping to find better product raw materials to solve some product pain points, realize product upgrading through technological research and development and enhance the competitiveness of enterprises. So far, domestic screen enterprises have gradually overcome the technical difficulties of mini / micro LED display products, including mini / micro led ultra-small spacing chip manufacturing, product yield improvement, stable product packaging and massive transfer, etc. The breakthrough of technology is inseparable from the discovery and effective application of new materials. Therefore, in the R & D process of mini / micro LED display products, screen enterprises are also constantly trying new materials, including light-emitting semiconductor materials, panels, drive chips, etc. In general, mini LED is a system engineering integrating a number of technologies, and panel technology is one of the more important ones. The innovation of panel technology has also become a topic of concern for many enterprises today.

The basis of panel innovation is the selection of substrate materials. In the selection of substrate for LED matrix, the range of material selection is also very wide. It can be either traditional glass fiber board, flexible PI and CPI materials, glass, ceramics, etc. in terms of small size, there is also a single FPC substrate. At present, there are two main research directions of mini led substrate in the market: glass substrate and PCB. In fact, glass substrates and PCB boards have always maintained a "clear-cut" situation. The main reason is that PCB substrates are generally used in electronic equipment of integrated circuits, and the panels used in conventional LED display screens on the market are basically PCB substrates. The glass substrate is mainly used by liquid crystal panel enterprises. However, the emergence of mini / micro LED backlight technology has broken the boundary between the two applications. There are also different voices on the market, arguing about which panel is more suitable for the application of mini / micro LED display technology. For LED display manufacturers, this is also a difficult choice.

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the positioning of screen enterprises may become a choice standard

In fact, at present, glass substrate and PCB have their own advantages and disadvantages in application. From the technical level and application adaptability, the advantages of glass substrate are more obvious: the application of mini LED backlight glass can meet the current general demands for thin thickness and reduced power consumption of the whole machine, and the thermal conductivity of glass substrate is high. It can better maintain the stability of panel in high-density welding products and meet more complex wiring requirements; Due to the limitation of the material itself, the heat dissipation of PCB substrate is not strong, which is easy to produce warpage and deformation in the process of large-scale application. From the perspective of cost, due to its own reasons, the traditional PCB boards produced in China can not meet the requirements of emerging display products in terms of stability and accuracy. It is necessary to import high-end PCB board products from abroad to make up for this defect, increase the cost investment, and keep the price of PCB packaging products high. At present, the cost of glass substrate packaging products is also quite high, mainly due to the low yield of products. The raw material of glass substrate is plain glass, which is fragile and vulnerable. In the process of production and handling, physical injuries such as collision and scratch will inevitably occur, resulting in product breakage, which will affect the production yield. Therefore, in the production process, the yield and cost are superimposed, which makes the product price remain high. In this regard, PCB has more advantages: PCB has a long time of technical development, higher maturity, relatively complete supply chain, and the yield is improving year by year, but it is technically unable to complete the loading of new display. However, both technologies are advancing and developing. If LED screen enterprises want to make a choice between the two technologies, they need to consider not only the cost technology, but also the development positioning based on the enterprise itself.

At present, the development of LED display industry in glass substrate industry chain is still in its infancy, and more funds need to be invested to reach a mature state. For many screen enterprises, every decision will affect the future trend of the whole enterprise. However, the whole social and economic development is backward. In order to achieve long-term sustainable development, enterprises must adhere to the development strategy of continuous product R & D and innovation. After decades of industry development, LED screen enterprises have gradually realized that the technical content of display screen will be higher and higher in the future. Small and medium-sized screen enterprises have less capital and scientific research than leading enterprises, and often achieve win-win results through cooperation. While leading enterprises in the industry have high-end products to start the brand, they will not leave conventional products and realize the company's development by innovating the application form of products. Mini / micro led, as the general development trend of display screen industry in the future, is an existence that can not be ignored by screen enterprises. If the enterprise occupies the market advantage in the early stage, it will play an important role in the future development of the company. Therefore, LED screen enterprises will actively layout the mini LED display market and pay so much attention to the product upgrading of mini LED display.

The advanced development of micro LED may affect the panel layout

At the current stage of intense competition in the mini LED display market, micro LED display products also began to enter the market. As the upgrading or upgrading of mini LED display technology, the commercialization progress of micro LED display technology has always attracted the attention of the LED industry, and how to realize the upgrading of mini LED display to micro LED display has also become the top priority of screen enterprises. At present, micro LED display products have come out. In addition to Sony, Samsung and other international display products, leading enterprises have successively launched micro LED display products, and domestic LED display leading enterprises are carrying out further technical research and development. Obviously, enterprises are making technological breakthroughs in the quantification of micro LED display products, but the most critical core technical difficulty is the massive transfer of technology. The difficulty of this technology is to transfer the fabricated small LED light-emitting elements to the substrate of the fabricated driving circuit. However, whether it is large screen display such as color TV and computer, or small screen display such as mobile phone screen, the number of pixels is quite huge, and the size of pixels is very small. If there is "error" in pixels, there will be "bright spots" or "dark spots" on the screen, Therefore, it is quite difficult to transfer these small pixels perfectly, and the loss caused in the production process is also huge, which indirectly leads to the increase of the cost of micro LED display products. The success of massive transfer is related to the success of micro led commercialization. Screen enterprises are also further seeking solutions. At present, the solutions revealed in the market include the use of magnetic force, electromagnetic force or micro printing. Compared with PCB substrate, glass substrate has the characteristics of flatness, stability and high temperature resistance, which is easy to realize huge transfer, so it has become the technical optimization direction of many manufacturers. Glass substrate has become the preferred solution for small and medium-sized micro LED displays such as mobile phones and smart watches. Of course, large screen display is also trying to use glass substrate, but the fragile characteristics of glass substrate may also affect this. After all, the larger the area, the higher the technical difficulties in transferring pixels, and the loss probability will increase in geometric multiples. However, this technical problem is believed to be solved in the future. At present, when micro LED display products are hot, glass substrates have obvious advantages in transfer technology compared with other substrates.

At present, screen enterprises have great enthusiasm in exploring the subdivided field of LED display, because the development of subdivided field also means the opening of another new market. Micro LED display technology has gradually matured in the efforts of the industry, so developing new application products has become the next plan of screen enterprises. Recently, vuereal announced that micro led transparent screen has received batch orders. It is understood that this new transparent micro LED display based on glass substrate has a transparency of up to 85%, a size of about 3-4 inches and a brightness of more than 3000nit, positioning the display application markets such as wearable, vehicle and ar. From the development trend of LED display application field in recent years, the product form of traditional LED display continues to evolve into new display products with the demand of the times and the market and the support of technology, such as ice screen, interactive floor tile screen, transparent screen and so on. Micro LED will gradually extend other different types of products with the progress of society in the future. At present, transparent screen has become a feasible direction: the glass substrate itself is made of transparent glass, which has inherent advantages. Of course, micro led transparent screen can also use other substrates, but it can be slightly inferior in display effect.

At present, the dispute over Mini / micro LED display panel in the market is not over. It is mainly based on the consideration of the company's development and future benefits, whether the burden is too heavy for the transformation of the industrial chain, and whether the enterprise can support and then complete the gain. PCB is the common substrate of traditional LED display manufacturers, and cob packaging technology is gradually mature. To convert the industrial chain, they also need to think about the benefits of micro LED display products to the company in the future. Although the glass substrate has obvious advantages, whether it can be favored depends on the vitality injected into the market by the final transparent substrate under the consideration of cost and benefit. At present, the development space of transparent substrate is large and needs to be explored. It has become the future trend of micro LED display, which needs to be further explored. It may be a huge leading market to be found.