Three key aspects of LED display cost savings

In the past few decades, LED display technology has made rapid progress in blue and green light because of the improvement of epitaxial material preparation technology and the optimization of device physical structure design. These dramatic changes should be attributed to the continuous performance. Improvements and rapid declines in costs have led to significant developments in application areas and scale. However, looking forward to the more challenging new areas of general lighting in the future, further breakthroughs in LED technology are necessary, and this time the breakthrough will focus more on how to reduce the cost of LED use.

The manufacturing cost of LED devices is still very high compared to silicon-based devices, mainly because the scale of the industry and the degree of technological development are far less than those of the silicon-based semiconductor industry. However, with reference to the development of the mature semiconductor industry, we can expect that the manufacturing cost of LED devices will continue to decline in the next 10 years. The main cost savings contribution will focus on three parts:

1. The advancement of core equipment manufacturing technology will double the production efficiency, thereby significantly reducing the depreciation cost, the most typical is the GaN epitaxial MOCVD equipment;

2. The size of the processing wafer is doubled, from the current mainstream 2 inch wafer to 4 inches, which will greatly reduce the processing cost of the chip process;

3. The expansion of the industrial scale will significantly reduce the cost of raw materials consumed and the overall management costs. Based on these factors, it can be expected that the cost of LED chips will continue to decrease in the next 10 years, which will further stimulate the development of emerging LED applications.