Micro LED Scales Up: The LED Display Industry Boldly Explores New Application Scenarios

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05/21/2025

On 05/21/2025

The year 2025 marks a breakthrough in the large-scale adoption of Micro LED display technology. Specifically, MIP-packaged Micro LED products are projected to experience a fivefold increase in market application compared to the production capacity built in 2023–2024. MIP-based Micro LEDs are poised to become the go-to innovation weapon for many brands in 2025.

Meanwhile, COB-based Mini LED products are also transitioning toward Micro LED, with this evolution becoming increasingly evident. Since 2022, a new wave of price cuts in COB products has triggered an average 60–70% reduction in product prices. This has broadened pixel pitch options, expanded application scenarios, and significantly boosted market size. Now, reducing upstream component costs is a key objective for the COB segment—among which, accelerating the adoption of Micro LED chip specs is a major strategy.

Industry insiders anticipate that by leveraging both MIP and COB technologies, Micro LED direct-view display products will achieve significant market growth in 2025. In other words, the dual-path approach—MIP and COB—has formed a robust framework to support the commercialization of Micro LED displays. As a result, exploring suitable application scenarios for Micro LED will become a new frontier for innovation.

Table of Contents

Replacement Strategy: A Technology Iteration Focused on Existing Markets

The 2025 rollout of Micro LED—whether via MIP or COB—has one thing in common: it relies heavily on replacing existing display products.

For instance, beginning in 2024, as COB prices dropped, manufacturers began expanding into larger pixel pitch ranges. P1.5 and P1.8 models have become hot items, with P1.5 emerging as the leading size driving COB market growth. As production costs continue to fall, COB displays are expected to rapidly replace SMD products in the sub-P2.0 market. Some brands have even started developing large-pitch COB products for outdoor applications.

As for MIP, while 2024 saw exciting advancements such as AM-drive MIP solutions with built-in ICs and smaller pixel pitch formats like 0202 and 0303, most manufacturers focused on pixel pitches above P1.0. For example, Unilumin achieved MIP coverage from P0.4 to P3.9 by the end of 2024.

From a packaging perspective, the mainstream devices in the MIP market—such as Jingtai’s 1010, DSS’s 0808 and 1010, and Nationstar’s MIP-CIMD12, MIP-AIMD19, and MIP-AIMD26—are not targeted at the traditional sub-P1.0 micro-pitch niche. Instead, they are designed for the more mature P1.0–P3.0 market, where applications and product types are more clearly defined. The goal is to quickly achieve scale by replacing conventional SMD products.

In short, the focus of Micro LED applications lies primarily in upgrading existing markets, rather than exploring new, untapped verticals. Within the LED direct-view display segment, Micro LED’s most certain growth path for 2025 is as a drop-in replacement for older specifications and Mini LED products.

Capacity Paradox: Technological Upgrades Trigger Supply-Side Disruptions

While the commercialization of Micro LED is a major advancement for the evolution of LED display technology, it also introduces short-term challenges—chief among them being production capacity pressure.

Take the example of replacing a 200µm chip used in P2.0 displays with a 50µm Micro LED chip. This theoretically yields 16 times more “pixels” per wafer, which translates to 16 times the display capacity at the same pitch level.

While such replacements are relatively seamless for downstream manufacturers and offer cost savings for end users, they introduce intense capacity stress for upstream suppliers—especially wafer fabs. As Micro LED continues to penetrate pixel pitches below P3.0, a greater portion of upstream capacity will be dedicated to Micro LED chips. New capacity expansions in Micro LED production could lead to bottlenecks and oversupply upstream, threatening the supply-demand balance across the entire value chain.

Thus, Micro LED isn’t just a new spec—it radically amplifies the pixel output per wafer. If demand for smaller-pitch displays doesn’t scale accordingly, the supply equilibrium will collapse. In the short term, Micro LED’s impact on production dynamics may outweigh its significance as a technological breakthrough.

The Solution: Dual-Engine Growth to Unlock Incremental Demand

To address potential overcapacity caused by Micro LED’s rise, the LED display industry must tap into new growth drivers and application spaces to preserve healthy supply dynamics.

First, the industry must accelerate the shift to ultra-high-definition (UHD) displays, which require higher pixel densities and smaller pitches. This trend was highly evident in 2024. According to data from RUNTO, revenue from P1.4–P1.1 products grew 30% in 2024, while shipment area surged by 120%.

This growth primarily stems from demand for 2K and 4K screens in the 75–300 inch range—such as indoor advertising and storefront displays—which are rapidly transitioning to UHD. Enhanced content quality and sharper visuals are boosting audience engagement, significantly increasing the need for pixel consumption. For instance, a P1.5 display requires 4× more pixels than a P3.0 display of the same size.

Second, the industry must pioneer brand-new application scenarios, such as TV-like consumer and commercial displays, conference all-in-one systems, and private cinemas. These products usually require pixel pitches around P1.0 or even smaller, placing tremendous pixel consumption demands on upstream capacity.

Other examples of application innovation include:

Unilumin’s Unatural Lingyin Series (2024): The world’s first display integrated with architecture, offering a seamless, wall-tile-like screen-off experience. It sets a new milestone in treating LED displays as architectural materials.
AOTO’s XR-BoRoom: A professional-level XR live-streaming studio solution designed to capture the booming live commerce market with virtual production technology.
LianTronics’ Solar-Powered LED Display: An innovative solution combining photovoltaic energy storage with outdoor advertising and signage, targeting display upgrades in the smart city sector.

These diverse, functionally distinct solutions—featuring software-hardware integration and content services—demonstrate how the LED industry is leveraging Micro LED innovations to unlock new demand and scale.

Cost Innovation: The Underlying Driver

Whether in consumer TVs, in-car displays, differentiated terminals, or widespread UHD adoption, one fundamental issue underpins them all: cost.

Sustained cost innovation is critical to market growth because users must be able to afford the technology. Micro LED is inherently a cost-competitive technology. Its smaller chip size not only increases pixel output per wafer but also reduces cost per pixel.

Moreover, innovations such as integrated ICs, all-in-one system boards, and new assembly processes are continuously driving down system-level costs.

In essence, embracing Micro LED means embracing cost competitiveness—and also embracing new application scenarios, end-user innovations, and the UHD era.

Micro LED is not merely a technical upgrade. It represents a qualitative transformation in the entire digital display innovation system. With 2025 as the starting point for Micro LED’s commercial scale, the industry is entering a new wave of comprehensive innovation.

Conclusion

In 2025, Micro LED enters large-scale adoption, driven by MIP and COB packaging. As it replaces traditional LED and Mini LED products, the industry faces supply pressure but also gains momentum through UHD demand and new applications like LED TVs and smart architecture. Micro LED is reshaping the display landscape with higher efficiency and lower costs.