MICLEDI's total funding reaches $30M
Belgian microLED company MICLEDI Microdisplays, a spin-out from Imec, has announced a first closing of its Series A funding round with participation from Imec.xpand, PMV, Imec, KBC and SFPIM, bringing the company’s total funding to date to nearly $30 million.
“The company’s achievements during this seed round have been astounding,” said Sean Lord, CEO of MICLEDI. “Our door is open to engagements with some of the world’s largest and most innovative electronic product manufacturing companies, most of whom are working on their own internal development projects for augmented reality (AR) displays in such diverse use cases as smart-wearable devices and automotive HUDs. This level of total funding to date is almost unheard of for a four-year-old startup.”
MICLEDI used the seed round to validate a unique 300mm wafer manufacturing methodology, the first in the world at 300mm. Seed funding also enabled the company to prove best-in-class blue and green GAN-based microLED arrays with pixel-by-pixel microlenses in its unique 300mm flow.
The company also demonstrated solid red performance using red GaN material with early proof of superior performance based on red AlInGaP. All three colours, R, G, and B, were demonstrated to large audiences at CES 2024 and SPIE AR-VR-MR 2024.
Lord added, “This newest round of funding will be used to expand the team, design and build an active backplane ASIC, and create a fully-functional microLED display module that can be used in glasses for AR displays. In addition, the new funds will help support collaboration agreements with customers and ensure that we keep pace with the growing demand for increasingly immersive video applications from Tier 1 customers and partners in the rapidly growing AR market.”
MICLEDI and Global Foundries (GF) have agreed to transfer the company’s microLED manufacturing flow into GF’s CMOS fab in conjunction with backplane ASICs designed in GF’s advanced CMOS process nodes, believed to be a first in the microLED industry as part of the enablement of cost and volume demands of the burgeoning AR market.
Coming in 2024, MICLEDI says it will have available full-colour modules with an active backplane and is developing configurations of all three basic intrinsic colour arrays with quantum dot filtering on already brilliant green and blue arrays. In addition, MICLEDI will introduce its first demo glasses in the first half of 2Q24.
