Small pitch led screen is the future of indoor display

Small pitch led screen is the future of indoor display

On the National Day military parade, a number of LEDs show that Black Technology has screened the screen in the circle of friends, and small pitch led screen, as a branch of LED technology evolution, has recently appeared frequently in the overall display industry.

   In the past, TCL Huaxing launched a 75吋8K MLED star-screen TV. After that, Huacan Optoelectronics and BOE reached a cooperation to jointly develop the Mini LED display technology. With the synergy of the industry chain, the Mini LED market is gradually heating up. According to Huatai Securities, the size of the Mini narrow pitch LED screen market will reach 2.2 billion yuan next year. Yang Lichang, the chairman of the accumulation group, also expressed his optimism about this new technology and believes that it will enter a period of rapid growth in 2020.

   From the perspective of the future market, the Mini fine pitch LED screen as a high-end display in the display field is bound to form a positive situation with OLEDs, but is this really the case?

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   The future shows that self-illumination is the key

   Inheriting the fine pixel LED display technology, the development of the Mini LED is still around the smaller LED chip size and spacing between each other. Compared with the previous chip size of more than 200 microns, the requirements of the Mini LED are 50-200 microns, which provides the basis for the refined application of the Mini LED. The mainstream application mode of the Mini LED backlight is also to take advantage of this, through the more dense lamp bead arrangement to achieve more delicate partition control, thereby improving the screen contrast effect, which is compared with the traditional LED lamp bead partition arrangement progress Very obvious. However, this is still only based on the traditional liquid crystal panel control point, and can not fully exploit the self-illumination characteristics of the Mini LED, not to mention the life reliability advantages brought by inorganic materials.

   The reason why OLED is called the display technology of the LED is still the high contrast, thin and light effect brought by the self-luminous characteristics. From this point of view, the market for Mini LED backlight applications will be OLED. It has caused an impact, but there are still some difficulties in replacing OLEDs.

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   From the perspective of display technology, Micro LED has always been regarded as an innovative technology for future display. The fundamental reason is that it can satisfy both self-illumination characteristics and higher reliability. However, in order to achieve self-illumination of sub-pixels such as OLEDs, Micro LEDs need to realize individual sub-pixels to drive illumination separately, thus placing higher requirements on LED chip miniaturization process and dot pitch. However, due to the problems of huge transfer technology, Micro LED does not guarantee yield, so it is commercialized on a larger crystal size Mini LED.

   Although it is impossible to completely defeat OLED, Mini LED still has a broad market prospect. This is not driven by technology but is the choice of the market. This is another reason why Mini LED is called transition technology.

   What are the reasons for the industry to push the Mini LED?

   The reason why Mini LED is sought after by the upstream and downstream of the industry chain is that it needs to return to each link.

   The first point is the maturity of upstream conditions, which is not only reflected in the Mini LED technology, but also in the improvement of the traditional LED chip industry. According to LEDinside data, the domestic LED chip market was 17.1 billion yuan last year, a year-on-year growth rate of 4%, while the growth rate of the previous year was 19%. In 2018, "the total production capacity of mainland LED chip manufacturers reached 11.2 million pieces per month, with a growth rate of 31%." Under the peak of industrial scale and overcapacity, LED chips are bound to usher in a price discount.

   Take LED chip leader Sanan Optoelectronics as an example in the first half of this year, its revenue was 3.388 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 18.82%, and its net profit at home was 883 million yuan, down 52.34% year-on-year. In this regard, Sanan Optoelectronics explained that “although the production capacity of LED chips has increased, the price has dropped significantly compared with the same period, coupled with the backlog of inventory, the performance has been hit.”

   Not only Sanan Optoelectronics but also the performance of many other LED chip listed companies have been damaged. The primary reason is that the competition caused by the decline in product prices has intensified. Attributable to the construction of the Mini LED industry chain, on the one hand, the competition of LED chips is intensified, and the production and packaging processes are more mature, which is conducive to the penetration of the catalytic backlight Mini LED; on the other hand, the competition in the Red Sea forces the LED chip enterprises to transform and upgrade, and accelerate the capacity conversion. As a commercial display technology in recent years, Mini LED will undoubtedly be the best springboard for the smooth transition of enterprises, which will benefit the performance.

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   The second is the fatigue of OLED products, which is mainly concentrated in the large screen field. Compared with traditional LCD TVs, OLEDs have obvious advantages, but the cost is high, and OLED TVs are always difficult to popularize. In the panel production capacity distribution, domestic screen manufacturers mostly focus on the G6 flexible AMOLED production line, which is positioned in small and medium-size. However, in the high-generation OLED production line, the domestic screen factory is still in the layout stage. Huaxing Optoelectronics' previous G10.5 large-size OLED panel production line (T7) will not be put into production until 2021, and the production process is reported to focus on inkjet printing. As the key to the Downsell of large-size OLEDs, the inkjet printing process is critical.

   However, from the current technical difficulty and production line planning, OLED prices will still be on the benchmark for a while in the short term. In the surplus of LCD panels and the downturn in the terminal market, screen manufacturers need to introduce more competitive technology in this window, and Mini LED is the best choice.

   As a manifestation of the will of consumers, the trend of the terminal market in recent years has also highlighted the trend of product development.

   According to the data of Aowei.com, “The retail sales of domestic color TVs in the first half of this year was 64 billion yuan, down 11.8% year-on-year.” Demand is still weak, but in which the color TV market is also ushered in a high-end consumer structure upgrade. Therefore, in addition to the traditional LCD TV, major manufacturers such as Hisense adopted a technical idea of ​​stacking screens to upgrade products.

   Among the influx of mobile phone manufacturers, although everyone is mainly engaged in screen interaction, but from the perspective of Huawei's smart screen and one plus TV quantum dot TV, the demand for user TV will still be in the quality of audio and video. In order to stimulate users to change their needs, manufacturers need to produce more technically competitive products, and Mini LEDs once again act as a savior. According to the supply chain news, the next generation of Huawei smart screen will use Mini LED technology instead of OLED. Due to price factors, manufacturers regard Mini LED as the technology that will detonate the market in the next year, thus saving the weak color TV market.

   From the perspective of industry chain demand, Mini small pitch LED screen may not be an innovator we hope, but more like a savior with the hope of the whole village.