Analysis of Micro LED industry technology situation based on patent perspective

The principle of Micro LED display technology is to thin-film, miniaturize, and array the LED structure design. Its size is only between 1 and 10 microns. Then Micro LED chips are transferred to the circuit substrate in batches, and the physical deposition process is used to complete the production of protective layers and electrodes. Finally, the upper substrate is packaged to complete the display. Micro LED, like OLED and QLED, is an active light-emitting display technology, but Micro LED display uses inorganic GaN LED chips, which has better luminous performance and longer service life. Current research in the field of Micro LED shows diversified characteristics. Most of the literature uses patent databases (such as incoPat) to carry out macro-situation, technology composition, geographical distribution, core patents and competitive landscape analysis, supplemented by technology roadmaps and efficacy matrices, to systematically evaluate innovation trends and industrial layout in the field of Micro LED. Part of the research focuses on theoretical research in the field of technical performance optimization and device preparation, exploring how to improve the optoelectronic performance, heat dissipation efficiency and full-color display capabilities of Micro LED through methods such as finite element simulation, array design and process experiments. Some scholars also discussed the Micro LED industry based on regional industrial foundation, corporate cooperation and policy support.challenges, opportunities and development paths faced by China. This article integrates patent measurement and BER Topic topic model analysis methods, and further realizes fine-grained clustering and semantic mining of technical topics in the Micro LED field based on traditional dimensions such as patent application trends, technology distribution, regional pattern and innovation subject analysis. At the same time, by introducing multiple indicators such as protection type, legal status and patent value, a comprehensive analysis framework integrating technology, subject, law and value dimensions is constructed, thus forming a useful supplement and expansion to existing research in terms of analysis methods and research dimensions. 1 Industrial Technology Overview From an industrial perspective, on the one hand, head panel manufacturers are accelerating the integration of the entire industry chain. For example, in March 2025, BOE Huacan Optoelectronics' 6-inch Micro LED mass production line was delivered, with an annual output of 24,000 Micro LED wafers and 45,000k pixel devices, which are used in AR/VR, vehicle-mounted displays and other fields; in May 2025, AUO once again broke records and yield limits, delved into large-scale and transparent cross-domain application breakthroughs, and demonstrated the world's largest single-chip 42-inch transparent Micro A 64-inch transparent Micro LED display made of spliced LED displays. On the other hand, LED chip and material manufacturers continue to seek technological breakthroughs and production capacity expansion. For example, in October 2024, the Hubei Sanan Mini/Micro display industrialization project has a total investment of 12 billion. After the project reaches production, new gallium nitride Mini/Micro LED chips 1.61 million pieces/year, gallium arsenide Mini/Micro The annual production capacity of LED chips is 750,000 pieces (all based on 4-inch equivalent pieces) and 4K display packaging products of 84,000 units/year, which are supplied to well-known companies such as Samsung and TCL Technology. In June 2025, Qianzhao Optoelectronics announced that it would raise 204 million yuan in the investment project "Mini/Micro, high-light efficiency LED chip R&D and manufacturing project" to implement the new "gallium arsenide chip expansion project." From a technical perspective, Micro LED technology can be divided into two major links: front-end epitaxial chip manufacturing and back-end mass transfer packaging. The front-end focuses on substrate materials (silicon substrate, GaN substrate), epitaxial growth process (multiple quantum well structure, stress relief layer) and chip structure design (vertical/horizontal structure, transparent conductive layer); the back-end focuses on mass transfer technology (vacuum pickup, laser transfer, fluid self-assembly), full-color display solutions (quantum dot conversion, three-color chip integration) and drive circuit design (TFT backplane, passive drive). An overview of key technologies is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Overview of Micro LED key technologies

2 Data sources This study uses the Derwent Innovations Index as the search database, using "Micro led" and "wafer welding"Taking keywords such as "mass transfer", "chip welding", "bonding drive" and "full color" as the core, a comprehensive search formula was constructed based on the IPC number. In order to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data used in this study, the following data cleaning work was further carried out. 1) Preliminary screening: Based on the title, abstract and keywords of the patent, keyword matching and logical rule screening were used to exclude obvious differences with Micro Patents that are irrelevant to the field of LED technology (for example, patents that only briefly mention relevant keywords in the background technology but mainly involve other irrelevant fields are eliminated) 2) Manual denoising: The remaining patents after the initial screening are arranged in reverse order of relevance, and the top 20% of the data are randomly sampled and reviewed, and the search terms are iteratively adjusted to manually eliminate obviously irrelevant results (such as those related to macro fields such as LED lighting, display panel drive circuits, etc. but not for Micro). LED core manufacturing process patents). 3) Manual review: Manual review is carried out on the patent data filtered through the above steps. Different researchers independently review the same batch of patents, compare the review results, discuss and re-evaluate the disputed patents, and finally determine whether Whether retained in the data set. After the above data cleaning process, the final patent data set contains a total of 10,779 patent documents. The search time is July 28, 2025, and the data in 2024 are not complete yet. Patent Situation Analysis 3.1 SpecializedPatent application trends Judging from the overall trend (Figure 2), from 2000 to 2014, Micro LED-related technology was in its initial development stage, with an average annual number of global patent applications of less than 20, and growth was slow. At this stage, Micro LED-related manufacturing technology is complex and the production process is not yet mature. In 2000, Jiang Hongxing and others from Kansas State University in the United States prepared Micro LEDs based on Group III nitrides. In 2001, they reported the successful preparation of a 10×10 blue Micro LED array using a passive drive method, laying a theoretical foundation for the development of Micro LED displays. In 2012, Sony released a 55-inch high-definition LED TV sample based on Micro LED. Micro LED appeared in the public eye for the first time as a commercial product. Since 2015, the annual number of patent applications related to the global Micro LED field has exceeded 100, with a significant growth rate, and related technologies have entered a stage of rapid development. The driving factor for R&D during this period was mainly the commercial application needs of enterprises in the display field. In June 2016, Sony demonstrated a CLEDIS display using Micro LED components as pixels at both InfoComm and Germany's IFA exhibition. Its excellent display effects were highly praised by the industry and started a Micro-LED research boom. In addition, since Micro LED display technology spans multiple industrial fields and is used in applications such as micro displays and display panels,The imagination space is very broad, attracting many industry players to invest in research and development, making it gradually become one of the key technological focuses of international competition. From the perspective of key subdivided technology fields (Figure 3), mass transfer technology has an early layout and relatively stable growth. After reaching the peak of applications in 2020, it entered a plateau period, indicating that the technology still faces major challenges, and innovation has shifted from principle breakthroughs to in-depth optimization for specific process scenarios. As a key link in heterogeneous integration, bonding technology has seen significant growth. The number of applications in the early stage was small, but it has increased sharply since 2016. The number of applications will reach a peak of 152 in 2022, indicating that this technology has become a research and development hotspot in recent years. There is an obvious linkage between packaging technology trends and bonding technology. The number of related patent applications grew relatively slowly before 2016, and then rose rapidly, reaching a high of 138 in 2023, with a prominent growth trend. The number of full-color technology patent applications continues to grow steadily, from 4 in 2000 to 98 in 2023. The continuous innovation of solutions such as quantum dot color conversion and three-color integration has promoted full-color technology to become a core breakthrough for improving display performance. Epitaxial growth, as a supporting technology in the upstream of the display industry chain, had a small number of applications in the early stage. It began to grow rapidly after 2017, reaching a peak of 177 applications in 2023. From 2022 to 2024, the annual number of applications for epitaxial growth technology continues to rank first, reflecting that the industry attaches great importance to research and development to improve the intrinsic performance of chips. In the future, as emerging display demands such as AR/VR and naked-eye 3D explode, bottleneck technologies such as mass transfer and full-colorCompetition for patents will become more intense. 3.2 Main technology distribution From the perspective of IPC distribution (Table 1), the two subdivisions with the largest number of patent applications in the global Micro LED field are H01L27/15 and H01L33/00, with more than 2,000 related patent applications each. In addition, there are also certain patent layouts in the four subdivisions of H01L25/075, H01L33/62, G09F9/33, and G09G3/32, with more than 1,000 patent applications each.

3.3 Distribution of major countries/organizations Relevant patent applications in the field of Micro LED technology are spread across many countries/organizations around the world, mainly including China (10,079), the United States (5,452), South Korea (2,729), the World Intellectual Property Organization (2,494), etc. (Figure 4). 3.4 Major Patentees From the perspective of patentee types (Table 2), only one of the top 20 patentees in the global Micro LED technology field is from a university, and the remaining 19 are enterprises, indicating that the driving force for industrial innovation in this technology field is relatively high. In terms of patentees and their countries, China has the largest number of patentees, with 13 in total, accounting for more than half; followed by the United States, with three patentees: Facebook Technology Co., Ltd., Apple Inc., and Intel Corporation; then South Korea, with two patentees, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and LG Display Co., Ltd.; and the remaining two are Japan Display Co., Ltd., Dutch company Lumileds. In terms of the number of patent applications, China's BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd. (647) and TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. (453) ranked the top two in the world. Although only two companies from South Korea were shortlisted, they ranked higher (third and fourth); those ranking fifth to ninth were all Chinese companies. It can be seen that China has gathered many powerful leading companies in the global Micro LED technology field, and its industry leadership effect is significant. From the perspective of technology layout (Figure 5), BOE’s related patent layout is large in number and in a wide range of fields, involving semiconductor components and parts, display panels, current derivation devices, manufacturing methods or equipment and other subdivisions; Samsung Electronics and LG are both in H01L2 7/15, H01L25/075, and H01L33/62 have laid out many patents in three fields, focusing on the semiconductor device segment; TCL CSOT has patents in H01L27/15, H01L33/62, and G09F There are relatively many patent applications in the 9/33 field, and there is a certain degree of homogeneous competition with BOE; Tianma Microelectronics, in addition to the H01L27/15 field, also has a certain patent layout in the G09F9/33 and G09G3/32 fields, focusing on Manufacturing of semiconductor devices; Xianyao Display not only has many patents in the three fields of H01L27/15, H01L25/075, and H01L33/62, but also has a relatively large number of patents in the field of H01L33/58, reflectingIt demonstrates its relative advantages in the segmentation of light field shaping components. Figure 5 Technical layout of the main patentees of Micro LED technology 4 Patent protection status 4.1 Technical themes The BERTopic model was used to extract the theme of the patent data set in the global Micro LED technology field, and a total of 35 subdivided technical fields were obtained. Through further hierarchical clustering, six major themes were obtained: display equipment, quantum dots/full color, display applications, materials and components, chips, and display screens (Figure 6, Table 3). Among them, the field of display equipment mainly covers subdivision directions such as substrates, drivers, arrays, and panels; the field of quantum dots and full-colorization mainly involves quantum dots, conversion, vertical stacking, pixels, etc.; display applications mainly focus on Micro The practice of LED in the field of micro-display (3D printing, augmented reality, etc.); materials and components topics include gallium nitride, phosphors, diodes, modules, etc.; chip research focuses on wafers, epitaxy, substrates, welding, bonding, mass transfer, etc.; display screens mainly involve screens, structures, connections, batteries, circuits, etc.