Laser equipment maker Coherent says that its customer have expressed a "reasonable amount of interest " in its Micro-LED solutions. The company is taking orders for R&D tools, but it says that mass production of Micro-LED displays is "still years away".

Coherent offers several laser-based tools used to produce Micro-LED displays, including Laser Lift-Off equipment (LLO) used to separate micro-LEDs from the sapphire wafer and Laser Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) used to move micro-LEDs from the donor to substrate.

In November 2017 Veeco and ALLOS Semiconductors announced that the two companies have completed their micro-LED strategic initiative and demonstrated 200mm GaN-on-Si wafers for blue and green micro-LED production. ALLOS proprietary epitaxy technology was transferred onto Veeco's Propel Single-Wafer MOCVD System to enable micro-LED production on existing silicon production lines.

Yesterday ALLOS and Veeco announced the completion of another phase of their mutual effort to provide the industry with leading GaN-on-Silicon epiwafer technology for microLED production. The two companies now demonstrated the reproducibility of ALLOS’ 200 mm GaN-on-Si epiwafer technology on Veeco’s Propel MOCVD reactor when producing epiwafers for many prominent global consumer electronics companies.

UK-based GaN-on-Si MicroLED developer Plessey Semiconductor announced a collaboration with EV Group (EVG), a wafer bonding and lithography equipment producer. As part of the agreement, Plessey purchased EVG's GEMINI production wafer bonding system to enable bonding and alignment at Plessey’s fabrication facility in Plymouth, UK.

Plessey says that the new system will enable it to bond its GaN-on-Si microLED arrays to the panel’s backplane at a wafer level. Plessey also says that EVG’s patented automated bond alignment system technology is suitable for Plessey’s requirements because it allows face-to-face alignment of the wafers with very high precision which will enable very small pixel sizes.