Apple’s latest MR device “Vision Pro” uses Micro OLED technology. This technology is regarded as a next-generation display technology together with Micro LED. What is the difference between Micro OLED and Micro LED? Who is more suitable for AR/VR/MR devices? Can Taiwanese factories take the lead? “Science and Technology News” will take you to understand once.
The research organization TrendForce pointed out that the ideal penetrating smart glasses must meet three major requirements: first, in order to reduce the wearing burden of the glasses as much as possible, the size of the display light engine should be less than 1 inch; second, in terms of content recognition requirements, The brightness specification of the display must reach at least 4,000 nits to ensure that it is not affected by the external environment such as weather or venue; finally, the resolution must be at least 3,000 PPI to make the projection zoom image clear.
At present, the technologies that meet these requirements are mainly Micro LED and Micro OLED, but Micro LED is currently in the early stage of AR technology development, and there are still many challenges to be overcome, so the mainstream technology at this stage is Micro OLED.
Micro OLED technology can achieve full color, becoming the first choice of AR/VR manufacturers
According to the comparison of TrendForce light engines, Micro LED is better than Micro OLED in terms of pixel size, luminous efficiency, and brightness. From the perspective of specifications, it is the most suitable application for AR glasses, but the current situation can only be a single green light color. Micro OLED Then it can go to full color, so it has an advantage in AR/VR equipment.
In terms of manufacturers, Micro OLED technology still uses SONY as the main supplier. Due to the longer investment time and more technical advantages, Korean manufacturers Samsung and LG Display (LGD) are expected to join Apple’s MR supply chain in 2024.
It was reported last year that Samsung initially believed that Micro OLED was a niche market, so it made slow progress and lagged behind its competitor LGD. However, it continued to face requests from Apple, Meta, and Samsung’s parent company to develop technology. It did not start working on Micro OLED until the third quarter of last year. Currently The latest news is that it will acquire eMagin, an American Micro OLED display manufacturer, for US$218 million.
At the same time, Meta will also cooperate with South Korean semiconductor giants SK Hynix and LGD to develop Micro OLED panels for Meta XR (extended reality) devices. In the future, we should see more applications of Micro OLEDs in AR/VR.
Micro LED is still at the bottleneck, but its medium and long-term performance is expected to surpass Micro OLED
TrendForce said that due to the bottleneck of full-color technology, Micro LED AR glasses are mainly monochrome display, which can only display basic information display functions, including information prompts, navigation, translation, and teleprompter; due to the need for higher resolution, It is necessary to shrink the chip, and the size of the Micro LED needs to be reduced to 5um. In this case, the epitaxy process will affect the yield due to the problem of wavelength uniformity; in addition, the smaller chip also reduces the external quantum efficiency (EQE) of the red chip. ) issues surfaced.
Overall, although there are still many challenges in the application of Micro LED in AR glasses, it still outperforms Micro OLED in many specifications such as contrast, reactivity, lifespan, and power saving. Under the premise that the light efficiency is difficult to break through the limit of 1%, Micro LED is still an excellent choice in the medium and long term.
Therefore, to introduce Micro LED technology, Apple is expected to use it in the Apple Watch first, and the current launch plan is also postponed from 2024 to 2025 due to technical bottlenecks. In fact, Apple has invested a lot of money in the past 10 years and cooperated with ams Osram to develop Micro LED components. After the technology is sufficient for mass production, Apple is likely to carry out the most critical “mass transfer” process by itself. According to Taoyuan Longtan secret research and development center.
It is worth noting that, in addition to Micro LED, Longtan R&D Center is also the place where Apple and TSMC cooperate on Micro OLED technology for MR equipment.
(Source of the first picture:apple）
