On June 24, Smartkem, a British organic thin film transistor (OTFT) material developer, announced that it had obtained a patent for a new method of manufacturing MicroLED displays. The patent involves patterning OTFT backplanes on Micro LED wafers and selectively removing Micro LEDs.
Smartkem Chairman Ian Jenks said that the company has established a strong intellectual property portfolio, covering a total of 140 authorized patents in 17 patent families. The newly obtained patent is an innovative Micro LED display manufacturing technology, which not only improves manufacturing efficiency, but also significantly reduces material waste and production costs.
According to reports, the new patented technology provides a better than traditional singleA more efficient and sustainable alternative to monolithic Micro LED display manufacturing. The principle is to selectively transfer only the required Micro LEDs from the growth substrate to the display substrate, rather than manufacturing the entire display on a single substrate.
The specific process includes: first preparing the Micro LED wafer and applying an adhesion layer to expose the selected Micro LEDs, then depositing the OTFT backplane on the adhesion layer and accurately aligning it to connect the exposed Micro LED, and finally the entire assembly is removed from the original wafer and transferred to a new display substrate.
Different from the traditional monolithic manufacturing method in which Micro LED and transistors are grown on the same wafer, Smartkem's new patented technology uses "selective removal" of Micro LEThe D method allows the wafer to be reused multiple times, and the resulting manufacturing cost is much lower than the traditional method of using the entire wafer at one time.
According to data, Smartkem is a British organic thin film transistor (OTFT) material developer. In May 2024, Smartkem demonstrated for the first time a Micro LED display sample based on its proprietary OTFT material. The sample is a 96x96 pixel Micro LED array. It uses a sapphire substrate and is planarized using Smartkem materials. Photolithography, etching, sputtering and metal layer patterning processes are used to realize the cathode and anode contact of the Micro LED to generate a display effect.
In January this year, Smartkem announced that it had completed its first contract with its partner Shanghai Xinyuanji Semiconductor (Chip Foundation) sells TRUFLEX® semiconductor materials, which the two parties will use to jointly develop a new generation of Micro LED backlight technology for LCD displays.
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