France-based 3D GaN LED developer Aledia announced that it has produced its first nanowire microLED chips on 300 mm silicon wafers, at the CEA-Leti pilot line. Producing microLEDs on large wafers is more cost effective and will enable integration with smaller-node electronics.

Earlier this year Aledia announced that it plans to establish a 140 million euros LED production fab in Champagnier, near Grenoble in France. The company already raised 80 million Euros towards that goal. The new fab will use Veeco's 300 mm MOCVD systems.

A few days ago Samsung launched a new MicroLED TV, 110-inch 4K prefabricated (not tiled) display. Today Korean publication PulseNews revealed that the TV costs 170 million Won, or about $155,000. Preorders will start before the end of 2020 and the TVs will ship in Q1 2021.

This is a premium at-home TV display, that offers a "breathtaking visual experience" - but still this is an extremely high price that means Samsung will not be able to sell large numbers of its new TV.

During the 2020 Chongqing Micro-LED Industry Innovation Forum, Konka introduced the world's first MicroLED Watch, the Aphaea Watch. This groundbreaking product uses a 2-inch microLED display with a pixel pitch of 0.12 mm - which means the resolution is around 400x400. The MicroLED chips are 30um in size

It is not clear how close Konka is to commercialize this product - but in any case this is a great achievement and this is the world's first microLED wearable display shown in a real product. The display is produced on an LTPS backplane, it achieves a brightness of 1,500 nits and a color gamut of 147% DCI-P3. Konka says that battery life of this watch is up to 35 days.

Sony published a teaser video that says the company will unveil the "next breakthrough" in directview display technology" on January 6th. It is likely that Sony will release a new MicroLED display technology:

Sony was the the first company to introduce micro-LED large-area displays with its launch of the Crystal LED (also called Canvas LED, or CLEDIS) displays in 2016. The company introduced its displays to the residential market in September 2020.

2020 is soon over - and many in the world are really happy about that and hope that 2021 will bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end. The MicroLED industry still continues its fast pace of development, even through this catastrophic period.

Here are the top 10 stories posted on MicroLED-Info in 2020, ranked by popularity (i.e. how many people read the story):

1. A discussion on MicroLED efficiency - microLED displays (Oct 14)
2. LG to soon launch its first tiled microLED TV (Jul 25)
3. Will Apple, AUO and Epistar establish a mini-LED and micro-LED production fab? (May 12)
4. Samsung aims to start producing real microLED TVs in 2020 (Mar 10)
5. We talk MicroLED displays with VueReal's CEO (Feb 18)
6. Konka shows its APHAEA tiled MicroLED displays at CES 2020 (Jan 9)
7. PlayNitride launches new displays at SID 2020 (Aug 7)
8. Samsung shows its Wall Micro-LED TVs at CES 2020 (Jan 7)
9. Mojo Vision develops microLED-based AR contact lenses (Jan 20)
10. Innolux shows a 55" rollable mini-LED emissive display prototype (Aug 25)

VueReal announced that its patented flipchip structure demonstrated higher yields and lower costs compared to standard vertical LED process.

The company says that flipchip processes are favored by display makers, due to the easy integration they offer. Most processes, however suffer from low yields and a complex process. VueReal's process has achieved yields higher than 99.9%, and with a more automated fabrication line can even achieve higher yields.