Apple is said to be working with Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC to develop micro-OLED screens. That states that Nikkei based on sources. These are small OLED screens that are intended for VR and AR headsets, for example.
According to Nikkei’s sources, this concerns relatively small OLED screens that are applied directly to a wafer. This differs from the larger OLED screens for televisions, for example, which are mounted on a glass substrate. The screens under development would be less than an inch in size.
According to the sources, this joint project between Apple and TSMC is still in an early phase. Mass production would therefore still take several years. In addition, certain parts of the planned production would use TSMC’s existing processes and equipment that it already uses for chip production. Production would take place in the Taiwanese city of Taoyuan at Longtan Science Park, where TSMC also has a factory nearby.
The ultimate goal would be to use these screens for upcoming AR headsets. The idea is that the micro-OLED screens can be made much thinner and smaller in this way and consume less energy, so that they are suitable for portable AR headsets, for example. These types of devices require very small screens. The advantages of OLED, such as the relatively high contrast, are also an advantage.
The application of micro-OLED screens is not new; the screens are already used as electronic viewfinders. All kinds of companies are working on this so-called oled-on-silicon technology, which should eventually make the Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology widely used for AR forgotten. Seeya Information Technology, which was founded in China in 2016, is working on micro-OLED screens, among others. This company is said to have a portfolio that includes a 0.62″ OLED panel with a resolution of 1728×1369 pixels, a 0.83″ OLED panel with a resolution 2560×1440 pixels and a 1.03″ OLED panel with a resolution of 2560×2560 pixels The French company Microoled is also working on the technology and is working on ActiveLook, a compact module for AR sunglasses.
Nikkei reports that Apple would also be working on microLED technology, for which a test production line would also have been set up. This technology should eventually be used in products such as the Apple Watch, iPads and MacBooks. For the development of this, Apple would collaborate with the Taiwanese company Epistar.
Just like OLED, MicroLED is a self-emitting technology. It has the promise of leading to near-perfect displays with very high brightness, a very wide color gamut, perfect contrast and excellent viewing angles. The difficulty of this, however, is to make the individual LEDs and therefore the pixels small enough, which is partly why this technology is currently still a difficult story for, for example, the consumer market of TVs. For much smaller screens that require very high resolutions, this technology is even more of a challenge.