 Hi. Hey. Welcome to Soul Semiconductor at Display Week 2023 in LA. Please introduce yourself. My name is Michels Ranberg. I'm responsible for display, sales, and marketing in Soul Semiconductor and happy to take you through this booth. And Soul Semiconductor is Korean. Correct. We are a Korean company. We've been in business for about 30 years. Our focus is making LEDs for display market and also other markets, but we really focus on generating photons. All right. And here I see micro LED, Wiccup. Wiccup. Wiccup. So what you see here is indeed Wiccup pixel technology. This is a vertical RGB pixel. Traditionally you see RGB pixels side by side. We make them on top of each other. Each color is individually controllable so we can create a full color spectrum, full color images. What you see here is two different displays, different brightnesses. These are 200 by 200 micron pixels, spaced at about 900 microns. So like this you can do 163 inch 4K. Correct. If you just put a bunch of them together. Yes, correct. 4K, 163 inch. And this is high resolution. So 600 micron pixel pitch. So it would be 108 inch 4K. Nice. And a few more inch you can do 8K. Yes. The cool thing about the vertical technology is that it allows you to actually enables a very good color of angle. If you have side by side RGB displays often the color is different depending on which from which side you view. With vertical pixels like we have you don't have that problem. All right. And what do we see here? So this is same technology just a bigger display so it has a more impactful image of course. So this is 4K, 163 inch display, similar to the technology you saw there. So to get 163 inch you need four of these or something, right? Correct. Yes. All right. So are there customers who actually use them already? So actually this kind of technology is really interesting for the virtual production market. So movie studios they don't like to go on location for a movie shoot. So they generate, they build these giant displays in their studios to display the background and the actors come in, you know, they shoot the scenes right there in the studio instead of going on location. And they put the right lighting and everything and the color so it looks like they're there. Especially in that environment what I mentioned before about the color of the angle is really critical because if they shoot from one angle versus the other angle they want to have consistent color. Otherwise post-production becomes really difficult. And I don't see the separation between each of the blocks. Correct. Yes. They're hard to see. Yes. We spend a lot of time maintaining the pitch going from one block to the next. And so that really comes down to cutting those segments that are really accurate, really accurately. Nice. How soon do you think regular consumers are going to have 163 inch 4K at home? How far are we? I think it will be a few years from now. A few years? Yes. It could be that you will supply into that? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. But I think the resolution needs to go up to really make this interesting for home consumers. Also, the price points are still a little bit high. You need AK. Yes. All right. AK smaller than, I don't know how many inches, but it's a lot of inches. Yes. So we need a big reduction in size. Yeah. All right. How do you reach smaller sizes? Smaller sizes, pixel size down. Transition from PCB to glass can help with that as well. But there's also a lot of technical things that need to be solved to enable that. All right. Cool. And what do we see around here? So we have also different technologies that are more focused on the, let's say, IT space. So monitors, laptops, notebooks, TVs. What you see here is a preview of an LE solution that gives full DCI-P3 coverage. So it's 100% DCI-P3, some more vivid colors to deliver. So we're working on technology and we'll be releasing that in the near future. So this is kind of a sneak preview for our clients here. I'm not sure how familiar your viewers are with DCI-P3. It's like the full color spectrum of, like it's a spec for the colors, right? Correct. Yes. So DCI-P3 is a spec that defines how big the color gamut is that the display can cover. And so we're developing a technology that covers it fully. And that's good for a lot of people like yourself, people that create content and want to make sure they can see all the colors that they record. Yeah. Definitely. My next camera is going to be a 10-bit 422, all that stuff. And I guess that's perfect market. Yeah. HDR. Yeah. But what is it? What is the display? No. It's an LED. We make LEDs. So we make devices that emit light that are part of the display solution. So you could be making the backlight on it? We provide the LEDs that go into the backlight, yes. So for the mini LED market, for example? We have a solution there as well. You want to just show you that? Yeah. Let's go over there. And on the way, you can maybe explain all the stuff. So this is a technology where we're working on creating a solution that removes the QD sheet from a display. So you see here mini LEDs, QD sheet to convert blue light into colors, and then the LCD panel. This is what is used as a solution in most of the mini-LED TVs today. What we're proposing is to actually take the phosphor, put it inside the LED, and so we are able to reduce the thickness even more, and also reduce the system cost. So a lot of TV makers in particular, consumers, want a lower cost TV. And with this technology, we enable that lower cost point. And do you achieve the same performance what the quantum dots guys are saying? So color-wise, that will be a trade-off, because quantum dots are not easy to integrate into an LED package. They cannot sustain the blue light that well. So that's why they separate the QD sheet from the LEDs this way. And the quantum dots guys are talking about putting the quantum dots directly in the micro LEDs, and also OLED and stuff, right? And are you involved in that kind of stuff? Maybe. Who knows. So the challenge with quantum dots is really how well do they handle blue light? And LEDs, all the LEDs that are used in our daily lives are based on a blue light, on a blue LED with a yellow or multicolor phosphor to generate a white light. So the blue photon power and quantum dots, that's a technical issue that needs to be resolved. This solution really brings cost reduction but also higher brightness to, let's say, automotive displays. The display mark has grown rapidly, more and more inches of display are in a car, and this solution is a perfect fit for that application. What we see here is what we call low blue light. Many of you spend a lot of time behind the screen, feel fatigued after working for many hours behind the screen, that has to do with the fact that there's a low wavelength blue light typically. If you reduce that content of low wavelength blue light, the fatigue disappears. So a lot of monitor makers are looking at increasing the wavelength of the blue to longer wavelengths to reduce that fatigue. If you don't do that without changing your phosphor recipe, the display turns out yellow, has a basically yellowish color. So what we're doing is we reformulate our phosphors and the chip combination so we can still keep the colors very crisp. So this is a mistake and this is the future? Correct. And what's happened here with the 2023-24? So there's a push to get less and less of that blue light and zero blue light is kind of the holy grail and we're pushing this envelope more and more every day. So that's more to come later. I don't like blue. I prefer red. So the image is the sky, the water is still blue, but what are you talking about another kind of blue? So blue, yeah, like I said, a white LED is a blue LED plus a phosphor and if you take away the phosphor it's just blue light and that blue light is what our brain doesn't like, our eyes don't like, it gives the fatigue. So shifting that blue wavelength to higher values reduces that sensitivity of the brain and the eyes, but they need to reformulate a new phosphor to work well with that, to maintain good colors in your display. So you can help all these nice people around the world to keep their eyesight longer and don't damage it. That would be a problem if the display industry is harming people. I don't think it's harming necessarily. It's more about making it easier to work with the display. And here it says, world's first technology, no wire, no package, no lens. And high voltage. So our technology, one of our key technologies is Wycop. Wycop is a brand name that is basically an LED without a package. So it's a chip that you can directly solder onto a PCB and use it. And that's the key for our mini LED technology. An arrow blue half width has less blue light fatigue, interesting, it's just some light comments. Sure, sure. The more efficient the blue light source, the better the color conversion on the quantum dot layer. What does that mean? The more efficient the blue light source, the better the color conversion when people use quantum dots. It all has to do with how the quantum dot is tuned to the wavelength of the blue LED. So quantum dot is a small particle that you have to pump with the right wavelength so it has to be tuned to each other. So it's like a marriage, you know, they both have to work well together. And mini LED with phosphor on the LED itself is impressive. Is that what you're doing? Ah, so that's the one that we showed there before. So that's an LED, but it's not a quantum dot, it's a regular phosphor. So bringing that to a quantum dot solution, that would be really amazing. It seems very bright. What's happening here? What we're showing here is really just how a mini LED display works. So we have two displays side by side, the same TVs, one without LCD, one with LCD, and we show a high contrast image. So the people can clearly see how the mini LEDs are turning on and off, so the different segments. So you can see how this works live. It's a lot of light that goes into a TV. Yes. What's the brightness and it's on that one? So this would likely be 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. No, no, no, it's much less, much less, like a 500-nit TV with a 4% transmission through the LCD panel. So people have to do math times 20-ish, a few thousand nits of brightness from the backlight. 10,000 nits comes through, only 500 exits the display. Yes. So it's very inefficient. Yes, the LCD panel absorbs a lot of light. And are you talking about making that better now? So what we're doing for the mini LED solutions is we're enabling thinner designs. So we've developed a method where we can design the chip so we don't use any optics, but we have some, let's say, solid state optics on this chip to control the light output. So what we can do is we can tune the emission pattern together to match it with the optical distance of the backlight design. And with that, we have control over how many LEDs are used. So customer wants lots of LEDs, great, that's the easy part. But if they want to optimize for cost and efficiency, then we can help them tune the radiation pattern so they can have more freedom in how many LEDs they use. What is showing here? So that's a cutout where we show the blue LEDs with the diffuser, the bottom dot sheet, and then another diffuser. Just to show the inner workings of this. Is your company a world leader in this field? Yes, we are. So when we talk about, for example, LCD displays, you've been in many of them. We talk about the mini-LED LCD displays. We supply in all the major brands that you can buy in the market, yes. All right. And is it a problem if some of the mini-LEDs break or they're never going to break in the background? They don't break. I would say other components break first. There's no burn-in. For LEDs? No, not really. Of course, an LED has a certain brightness profile over life, but that's pretty consistent, pretty predictable. Micro-LEDs, some people say it needs to be in a certain size to be called a micro-LED. I don't know. There's a whole bunch of different micro-LEDs happening, right? Yes, yes. Are you going to be playing in the field of home use, mass production micro-LEDs? Absolutely. Yes. So you're ready or you're going to? We will, yes. I can't say more. All right. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. And that was the whole booth? Okay. Yeah, that was it. Cool. Thanks for making time. Just come see us. Cool. So here, the display week, there's a bunch of 8K displays, there's 4K120, and all these new TVs can come with HDMI 2.1. And there's a whole bunch of updates that I'm going to be filming at the Computex 2023 with the HDMI Licensing Administrator, which are organizing all the display makers, the cable manufacturers, and making sure that they are compatible with each other. There's a stable performance, there's no interference, and there's a smooth 8K future with 48 gigabit per second support. And there's the whole infrastructure for certifying, for testing, for making sure there's no interference with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and stuff that people have. So thanks a lot for watching. Check out my HDMI playlist in hdmi.charbacks.com.