Mini LED enters the first year of commercial use

A few days ago, Apple brought three new products at the second autumn new product launch event in 2021, including the new Macbook Pro known as endorsement, which uses a Mini LED screen, supports 120Hz ProMotion technology, and has a peak brightness of 1600 nits. , The contrast ratio is 1 million to 1.

Wang Fei, vice president of industry research at TrendForce, told a reporter from China Business News that Mini LED is expected to usher in an obvious cycle of heavy demand this year and next, and it will enter the stage of industrialization in a true sense.

As terminal giants adopt Mini LEDs one after another, the commercialization of the industry is accelerating, and all links in the LED industry chain are moving in response to the trend, and they want to take advantage of the expansion of production to seize the market.

Mini LED is defined as an LED device with a chip size between 50 and 200 靘. In layman's terms, Mini LED is a single LED with a smaller volume. As the unit volume becomes smaller, the number of devices mounted on the display screen of the same area will be greatly increased.

Especially in backlight applications, Mini LED can replace mainstream LCD display backlights. It has the advantages of energy saving, light and thin, ultra-high contrast, wide color gamut, and second-level response speed, which greatly improves the display effect of the panel and its service life It is close to or even surpasses OLED.

According to market research organization Million Insights, the global Mini LED market will reach US$5.9 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 86.6% from 2019 to 2025. According to IHS forecasts, global Micro LED display shipments will reach 15.5 million units in 2026, with an average annual compound growth rate of 99%.

In fact, since 2019, manufacturers in the panel industry have successively launched Mini LED products, such as TV displays, computer displays, and car displays. However, due to factors such as low technology maturity and high cost compared with LCDs at that time, the initial development of Mini LED was slower than expected by the industry, and the shipment volume only hovered in the order of 10,000 units.

But since the beginning of 2021, Mini LED terminal products have begun to land one after another. As early as the April spring conference, Apple launched a new generation of iPad Pro 2021 equipped with Mini-LED technology. Three months later, Huawei also launched its own Mini. The LED product-Hongmeng flagship TV V75 Super, uses Huawei's self-developed Super Mini LED precision matrix backlight solution.

As two major manufacturers in the consumer electronics field, Huawei and Apple have introduced their products to Mini LED, making this panel technology quickly "popular". After that, Samsung, LG, TCL, and Skyworth also followed suit.

In this regard, Wang Fei said that despite the early development and layout of Mini LED, there are many factors involved in industrialization, including the exploration and improvement of many production processes, and the optimization and screening of technical solutions will take time. To grow up, the progress and follow-up of supporting industries will also take time. Before entering the stage of large-scale commercialization and mass production, small-scale production and sales are required for trial and error correction. This process is likely to take several years. At present, the results of the efforts of the upstream and downstream of the Mini LED industry chain are gradually Started to cash out.

China Securities Investment Research report also stated that “Mini/Micro LED technology has experienced more than ten years of development and is gradually maturing. Micro LED technology began to sprout in 2006 and was gradually introduced into the market in 2012. Mini LED took the lead in the industry in 2018. In 2020, it will cross the inflection point of the Gartner curve and enter the growth period. We expect that the second half of 2021 to 2022 will be a key time point for Mini LED mass production. As technology progresses and product yields mature, brand manufacturers have deployed , The penetration of Mini LED is accelerating. At the same time, Micro LED technology is also constantly breaking through, and the maturity of the industry chain is constantly improving. It is expected that there will be a heavy volume from 2023 to 2024."