The world's first non-destructive Micro-LED chip, "Qiushui Semiconductor" has received tens of millions of yuan in Angel + round investment | 36Kr exclusive.

Author | Lin Qingqing

Editor | Yuan Silai

36Kr has learned that "Qiushui Semiconductor", a Micro-LED display technology company, has recently completed consecutive angel round and angel + round financings of several tens of millions of Chinese yuan. The financing is led by InnoAngel Fund, with Lihui Capital, Shanhan Optronics, and Digital Light Core as co-investors, and Xingtang Capital serving as its long-term financial advisor. It is understood that the funds of this round are mainly used for the research and development and process verification of Micro-LED technology.

"Qiushui Semiconductor" was established in November 2022 and is a semiconductor company focusing on Micro-LED display technology. The company's main products are Micro-LED microdisplay chips and modules, covering application fields including digital car lights, micro-projection, and AR displays.

For a better understanding of the concept of Micro-LED microdisplay chips, we first need to understand the pain points of common LEDs. Traditional LED displays have a large pixel pitch, limited resolution, and certain limitations in brightness and energy consumption. They are a type of display screen for large-screen images.

Due to its unique advantages, Micro-LED microdisplay technology has expanded the application space of projected active displays. Micro-LED microdisplay chips have smaller pixel points and smaller chip sizes, which can achieve higher resolution and better color saturation. At the same time, they are also optimized in terms of brightness and energy consumption. Therefore, it can be used as a more refined and energy-efficient display technology to complement the existing LED technology.

The application scenarios of Micro-LED microdisplay technology are extensive, including digital car lights, augmented reality (AR) devices, wearable devices, and automotive displays. In the field of digital car lights, it enhances driving safety by providing more precise beam control and higher brightness. In the AR/XR field, Micro-LED improves the visual experience with its high brightness and low energy consumption characteristics. For wearable devices such as smartwatches, Micro-LED technology can provide high-resolution displays while maintaining a small size and reducing energy consumption. In the automotive display market, it improves the display quality of the vehicle information system.

According to a report by Grand View Research, the global Micro-LED market size is estimated to be 623.6 million US dollars in 2023, and it is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 77.4% from 2024 to 2030, reaching 25.65 billion US dollars by 2030.

The establishment of "Qiushui Semiconductor" originated from the research of Dr. Jiang Zhenyu during his doctoral studies at Pennsylvania State University. When Google launched the first-generation Google Glass in 2013, Jiang Zhenyu believed that Micro-LED display technology is the next-generation revolutionary display technology that will open up new application fields.

However, at that time, Micro-LED technology still had problems such as material damage and low optical efficiency, which severely limited the development and application of Micro-LED technology. Therefore, as 36Kr understands, as the first inventor of the patent, Dr. Jiang Zhenyu pioneered the Gap-free Microdisplay technology, which for the first time globally proposed using ion bombardment instead of etching to improve the problem of material damage.

Jiang Zhenyu told 36Kr that the team further invented a brand-new technical route - the Damage-free Micro-LED chip technology. This technology uses an electrically insulating structure instead of a physical insulating method to achieve electrical isolation of pixel points without material damage, effectively solving the material damage problem caused by the etching process in the traditional Micro-LED chip production, improving the efficiency and stability of the chip, and providing the possibility for the large-scale mass production of Micro-LED chips.

From the perspective of the technical route, Jiang Zhenyu further introduced that this technology not only breaks the exclusive monopoly of foreign companies' chip technology in projected displays but also solves the "bottleneck" problem of the projection industry. At the same time, "Qiushui Semiconductor" adopts the Hybrid Bonding 3D semiconductor packaging process and uses an advanced semiconductor manufacturing process to comprehensively improve the manufacturing process level of Micro-LED chips, improve the yield of the chips to a certain extent, and reduce costs. It is understood that "Qiushui Semiconductor" is the first Micro-LED startup in China to report the realization of an advanced process based on 8-inch hybrid bonding.

Currently, the main product of "Qiushui Semiconductor" is the Micro-LED chip product, which can be widely applied in the fields of micro-projection and AR displays.

The company's first-generation product is a 0.61-inch digital car light chip. Digital car lights are a new type of car light technology that uses Micro-LED chips to achieve more precise lighting control. Compared with traditional car lights, digital car lights can achieve pixel-level beam adjustment, reducing unnecessary light scattering and glare. Due to the high brightness and low energy consumption characteristics of Micro-LED chips, these car lights not only improve the lighting efficiency but also reduce energy consumption.

In addition, the faster response speed of Micro-LED technology enables the car lights to quickly adapt to different driving conditions. The intelligent functions of digital car lights are also more abundant. They can be combined with the vehicle's intelligent system to provide an adaptive lighting mode and even project navigation information on the road. These characteristics make digital car lights using Micro-LED chips far exceed the scope of traditional car lights in terms of performance and functionality.

Data from Statista shows that the market size of automotive LED lighting in China reached 3.35 billion US dollars in 2021. It is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.66% from 2022 to 2027, and the market size will approach 5.5 billion US dollars by 2027.

Dr. Jiang Zhenyu believes, "The Micro-LED car light market is a vast world waiting to be opened, and it is an opportunity from 0 to 1. Whoever solves the technical bottleneck first, seizes the market first, and can gain the right to define and dominate standards such as chip manufacturing and circuit board matching. Through the further maturity of the technology, in the future, Micro-LED chips will achieve the convergence of lighting and display, that is, the general light source not only has a single lighting function but also has multiple intelligent functions such as display, which is also the general trend in the future intelligent wave."

Currently, the first-generation product of "Qiushui Semiconductor", the car light chip, has been sent to customers for sampling, and it is expected to achieve mass production next year.

In terms of the team, "Qiushui Semiconductor" has a series of patents such as the Damage-free Micro-LED technology route. Its core technical team is one of the pioneers of China's hybrid bonding technology and has mature mass production process experience. Team members have profound professional knowledge and rich industry experience, and have achieved the mass production process development of the smallest pitch of 0.7 microns for hybrid bonding.

Investor Views:

Lu Jian, a partner of the Angel Fund, said that InnoAngel Fund is optimistic about the next-generation personal computing platform represented by XR and continues to invest in related fields. Micro LED is its ultimate display solution, but it has not been widely applied due to the limitations of the existing technical routes. The Damage-free technical route pioneered by Dr. Jiang is expected to achieve high-yield and low-cost mass production, helping related industries such as XR to develop rapidly. After more than a year of efforts, Qiushui Semiconductor has completed the process verification. We wish Qiushui Semiconductor to continue to work hard and achieve mass production as soon as possible! Fang Nan, the founding partner of Shanhan Optronics, said that Qiushui Semiconductor has just successfully verified the world's first Damage-free Micro-LED chip technology. The team completed the technical verification and process verification within just one year of the company's establishment. The Gap-free Micro-LED technology route used by the company is the patent achievement of Dr. Jiang when he was pursuing his doctoral degree at Penn State. This technology integrates an 8-inch wafer-level advanced hybrid bonding (Hybrid Bonding) manufacturing process, which can achieve high-resolution, high-yield, and low-cost Micro-LED chip mass production. It is a key link in Shanhan Optronics' Micro-LED industry chain layout. From helping to establish Qiushui Semiconductor and becoming an angel investor, Shanhan Optronics is fortunate to participate and witness the rapid development of the Qiushui team. We wish the digital car light products of Qiushui Semiconductor to achieve mass production smoothly.