Qiushui Semiconductor completed nearly 200 million yuan in financing, and MicroLED AR glasses are accelerating in full color

It is reported that "Qiushui Semiconductor", the world's first Micro-LED lossless bonding technology route, has successively completed Pre-A and Series A financing, totaling nearly 200 million yuan. This round of financing will be mainly used for the construction of Ningbo’s 8-inch hybrid bonding mass production line.

"Qiushui Semiconductor" was established in November 2022. It is a semiconductor company focusing on Micro-LED microdisplay chips and modules. Its products cover digital car lights, AR glasses, micro-projection and other application fields. The company's headquarters was originally located in Suzhou, but has recently moved to Ningbo.

By completely abandoning the traditional physical etching process, Qiushui Semiconductor has fundamentally solved the problem of damage to luminescent materials, providing a revolutionary solution for the large-scale mass production of Micro-LEDs and breakthroughs in red light efficiency. At the same time, Qiushui Micro-LED technology adopts a hybrid bonding vertical stack architecture, which has achieved hybrid bonding interconnection of optical chips and electrical chips within ultra-fine pitch within 3.75 micron pixels. In the future, the hybrid bonding pitch can be reduced to 2 microns, which is at the same process node as Huawei's recently released "Tao's Law" advanced hybrid bonding process pitch.

This round of financing was led by Zhaohui Capital, with participation from Commerce Fund, Shengyu Investment, Ningbo Talent Development Fund, Jiayi Venture Capital, Emerging Technology, Digital Optical Core and Xingtang Capital, with Xingtang Capital serving as long-term financial advisor.

The world's first technical route to promote the "iPhone moment" of AI glasses

Qiushui "Leyu" AR series modules

On the eve of the explosion of the AI glasses market, the mass production and full-color implementation of Micro-LED display technology is still one of the biggest problems facing the industry.

In 2025, the AI glasses market will explode. According to the latest data from Omdia, global AI glasses shipments will reach 8.7 million pairs in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 322%. The market share of display-enabled smart glasses has jumped to 8.4% from 3.3% in 2024. However, as the recognized next-generation ultimate display technology, Micro-LED has always been stuck on the bottleneck of mass production and colorization.

In the field of digital car lights, TrendForce analysis pointed out that the market penetration rate of adaptive headlights is expected to reach 21.6% by 2029, and car manufacturers such as Porsche have begun to adopt Micro-LED pixel module headlight solutions.

But whether it is AI glasses or digital car lights, the mass production bottleneck on the chip side is the main obstacle to the implementation of these two applications.

In the past, the industry generally used physical etching to segment Micro-LED pixels, which is like using a rough knife to cut extremely tiny light-emitting crystals, which will inevitably cause serious material damage at the incision. This damage not only results in low chip yield, increased leakage, and excessive light emission angle, but also causes the red light chip to lose more than 97% of its light efficiency, becoming an insurmountable gap for full-color applications. It is also the biggest problem restricting commercial mass production in downstream industries.

Faced with this industry pain point, "Qiushui Semiconductor" gave a disruptive solution: abandoning traditional physical cutting, and building an "electrically insulating" invisible wall between pixels through a unique and innovative chip architecture. As the world's first lossless architecture, it achieves electrical isolation of each pixel without damaging the physical structure.

The luminescent material is intact and the light effect is naturally retained to the maximum extent. Combined with an 8-inch silicon substrate and a hybrid bonding 3D packaging process, Qiushui Semiconductor's solution can increase the chip yield to more than 6N, narrow the light emission angle from ±60° to ±10°, and expand the operating temperature range from less than 50°C to over 140°C. This means that the Micro-LED chip industry has completely overcome the constraints of material etching damage. Using existing mature AlInGaP red light materials, Qiushui can quickly achieve mass production of red Micro-LED chips.

At present, Qiushui has completed the 8-inch hybrid bonding process of red light, and can achieve mass production and shipment of red light Micro-LED chips within this year.

In addition, the solution to material etching damage can also enable Micro-LED chips to catch up with the Moore's Law of Semiconductors and quickly push the pixel size from the current mainstream 4 microns to 2 microns or even sub-micron range, thereby meeting the needs of lightweight and high-definition display of AI glasses.

It is worth mentioning that the pixel size below 2 microns is a forbidden area for the Micro-LED industry, but it is not a forbidden area for the semiconductor industry. The lossless structure can completely break through this forbidden area. At the same time, etching damage and leakage channels are avoided, and the stability of automotive grade and consumer electronics grade products is better guaranteed.

The cost of a single chip has dropped significantly, and the 8-inch production line will be put into production within the year

No matter how good the technology is, it still needs mass production proof. At present, the industry is beginning to shift to the 8-inch wafer-level hybrid bonding process, but there are still very few companies that have truly opened up the mass production link. It is understood that Qiushui Semiconductor is the first domestic start-up company to complete the 8-inch hybrid bonding process.

In the domestic competition landscape, different development paths have emerged in the field of Micro-LED chips. Unlike some companies that adopt the asset-heavy IDM model with long line construction cycles and high financial pressure, Qiushui Semiconductor adopts the Fab-lite model: that is, it focuses on the construction of key processes such as hybrid bonding that lack mature foundry platforms, and achieves independent control of core processes.

This model gives the company a high degree of flexibility. It can not only flexibly design to meet the personalized needs of various customers, but also quickly start production. Currently, Qiushui Semiconductor is building an 8-inch hybrid bonding production line in Ningbo High-tech Zone, which is expected to be fully operational by October this year.

Jiang Zhenyu, founder of Qiushui Semiconductor, believes that the shipment volume of AI glasses with display functions is expected to increase from the current hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of units in the next year. After being put into operation, the Ningbo production line can produce thousands of 8-inch wafers per month, corresponding to the supply capacity of more than 10 million Micro-LED chips per year, which is sufficient to support the large-scale demand of leading terminal manufacturers.

In terms of products, Qiushui Semiconductor has previously launched a 0.61-inch digital car light chip and completed customer sample verification. At the same time, AR red, green, and blue monochrome chips are planned to be mass-produced and shipped this year. Jiang Zhenyu believes that monochromatic green light chips can already meet the needs of specific scenarios such as conference prompting, translation, car navigation, and swimming goggles. Red, green, and blue monochromatic chips equipped with three-color light-synthesizers can also truly realize large-scale application of color.

Qiushui "Hebo" smart car light series modules

As a member of the Ministry of Science and Technology's major new display expert group, Dr. Jiang Zhenyu graduated from Pennsylvania State University and is engaged in semiconductor optoelectronic materials and chip research. He has 15 years of experience in technology R&D and team management. He has served as a senior scientist at Dalian Dehao Optoelectronics, the R&D director of Foshan Nationstar Semiconductor, and the R&D director of the Shenzhen Third Generation Semiconductor Research Institute.

Its co-founder has 8 years of experience in high-power LED car lighting entrepreneurship. The core members have worked for Huawei HiSilicon, Yangtze Memory, Intel and other companies, and have in-depth R&D experience in hybrid bonding and advanced packaging processes.

Qiushui Semiconductor is not only making a chip, but also laying the underlying infrastructure for the upcoming "iPhone moment" of AI glasses. Through a series of breakthroughs in core technologies, Qiushui Semiconductor is reshaping the Micro-LED industry landscape as a pioneer, and contributing its own unique "Qiushui solution" to the vigorous development of the micro-display industry!

Zhang Yue, founding partner of Zhaohui Capital, believes that Qiushui Semiconductor has abandoned traditional physical cutting and built an invisible wall of "electrical insulation" between pixels through a unique and innovative chip architecture. This world's first lossless architecture achieves electrical isolation of each pixel without damaging the physical structure. This disruptive innovation that changes the underlying game rules is precisely laying the underlying infrastructure for the upcoming "iPhone moment" of AI glasses.

The person in charge of the China Business Fund project said: At present, the popularity of automobile intelligence and AI-AR intelligent hardware is accelerating, and Micro LED microdisplay has become a booming track in the field of semiconductor display. Qiushui Semiconductor's self-developed lossless hybrid bonding process overcomes common etching damage and pixel control problems in the industry, and is expected to solve the industry development bottleneck of Micro LED full-color display, with significant technical barriers and business blocking advantages. The company's core team has been deeply involved in the semiconductor optical display industry for many years, and has the capabilities of process research and development, mass production and industrial resource integration. It has a clear strategy and strong execution capabilities. We are optimistic that Qiu Shui will seize industry dividends by relying on its first-mover advantage in technology and help the Micro LED industry achieve breakthroughs and upgrades. We look forward to the company growing into a globally competitive leading micro-display company.