As the fastest-growing technology in the market in recent years, small-pitch LEDs have ushered in a new round of "new product launch peak." Among them, COB display technology shines and has become a new "process direction" that manufacturers pay attention to.
COB technology has gradually become mainstream
COB small-pitch LED display products, the first to enter the application range in 2016. This year, high-end audio-visual engineering giants such as Weichuang and Sony have applied small-pitch LED screens to ultra-high-a "special advantage" shared by the market and COB technology. Including manufacturing-level radio and television applications, high-end dispatching command centers, high-end conference rooms, etc. have become the scope of COB.
In 2017, COB display technology gained more market recognition. Including Samsung's display at the CES show in the United States in January 2018, a large number of heavyweight companies have joined.
2018 will be the beginning of COB small-pitch improvement
Industry insiders predict that the proportion of COB small-pitch LED products in the domestic market in 2018 may rise to "double digits": COB will become an ideal in 2018, from cutting-edge innovation and exploration to value-oriented main application products.
From the perspective of supply, the traditional COB product camp has two characteristics: First, on the small-pitch LED screen, the market is late, and giants such as Samsung and Sony are the same; the COB manufacturer not only uses COB as COB. An experience to better demonstrate technology is also used as a differentiated product brand, and it is a time for "latecomers to gain a time advantage in the next generation of products and overtake in the corner". Secondly, the traditional COB small-pitch companies have more advantages in surface mount products, which is related to their subsequent development positions. However, corporate brands that have a share advantage in surface mount small-pitch LED products are launching new technological paths. COB technology is extremely cautious-they are unwilling, their new products bury their future potential in the manufacturing chain.
Therefore, the global small-pitch LED market from 2015 to 2017 constituted two different innovation directions. One is that many companies are starting from next-generation technologies such as COB and are trying to achieve breakthroughs in the overtaking market. On the other hand, many traditional LED screen companies, especially small-pitch LED screen companies that use surface mount technology, mainly break the "ultra-fine-pitch technology" below 1.0 and improve the extreme performance of their products. Through the ISE exhibition, more companies, especially traditional LED screen manufacturers and listed companies, have entered the COB camp, which means the integration of the above two innovation directions-that is, the industry has clearly realized that even the small-pitch LED The surface can also achieve 0.7mm pitch, and surface mount LED products have huge inventory capacity and vested interests, but these cannot prevent the small-pitch LED industry from finally entering the COB period.
The support of more manufacturers will surely become the most basic "signal" for improving new technologies: the industry believes that the market supply of COB products in 2018 will be greatly improved or even doubled. The COB small-pitch LED display is becoming the latest incremental outlet for large-screen projects.
COB technology tends to leverage the small-pitch LED industry construction
Compared with the limit pitch products 0.8 to 0.7 of many giants in the small and medium pitch LED industry in the previous two or three years, the "limit characteristics" of COB products at the SIE exhibition are not obvious.
For example, Lehman demonstrated P1.5 pitch products. This spacing technique can be described as "cabbage". So why are manufacturers more willing to introduce "cabbage" pitch specifications into COB technology?
First of all, from the perspective of engineering theory, P1.5 spacing is a relatively large category in small spacing indoor application sales. It is also a "data display" (non-video) display application, the market share of the first gap indicator product. Because, as far as the appearance of the giant screen is concerned, the meaning of finer resolution not only decreases with the increase of the resolution, but also expands to a downward trend with the increase of the apparent area. At the same time, higher resolution also means higher costs, and the cost increase is geometric.
This has led to the emergence of large-screen projects, and the market value of the "pursuing pitch index" of small-pitch LED screens is not yet understood. More time, on the big screen, 1.2-1.5 pixel particles are the best separation point for "experience effect, economy". In this regard, the traditional large-screen splicing technology, DLP products also show "super high resolution" that "don't look at". In other words, the manufacturer intends to allow COB technology to quickly gain market share at a higher application level, and then choose p1.2-p1.5 as the main product.
Secondly, from the competition of small-pitch LED screens, the P1.2-P1.5 market has achieved rapid development in the past two years. The products once showed a trend of "diversification, cabbage and generalization". At this time, how to improve product experience and realize differentiated value in the "demand-side solution to the mainstream market" has become a major demand for product innovation.
COB packaging technology can make the visual effect of the small-pitch LED display more warm, greatly improve the appearance of image quality, and improve the stability and reliability of the large screen of the entire project. Regarding the P1.5 product, after adopting COB technology, the viewing effect of the screen is 5 meters apart, so it is not worse than the traditional surface mount technology P1.2 product, and even some performance is better-but the former has a long-term cost advantage. In fact, an important goal for the small-pitch LED screen industry to develop products with a pitch of less than 1.0 is the visual experience of "processing pixel granulation". However, lower pitch and more pixels lead to cost and scrap rate issues. COB technology can basically avoid the problems of substantial increase in cost and decrease in scrap rate, and achieve a significant improvement in visual performance on existing P1.2-P1.5 asphalt products.
Third, from the perspective of operation and competition, P1.2-P1.5 pitch small-pitch LED screens have entered a price decline. In other words, manufacturers are facing a crisis of declining gross profit. At this time, the second generation of small-pitch LED screens using COB technology can save the P1.2-P1.5 product line, and this downward price trend will bring additional economic benefits.
A new small-pitch LED market shuffles in the COB period
As COB technology continues to heat up, the impact of this technology on the industry’s market structure has also become the focus of the industry’s attention: Compared with surface mount technology, COB has changed a lot, and the most important one is "small-pitch LED screen manufacturing center technology. Focus on the packaging field."
COB is the abbreviation of chip-on-board in English, which is "wafer on board". In essence, COB is a packaging technology. Most traditional LED screens encapsulate one of the primary colors of red, green and blue into lamp beads for terminal manufacturers to manufacture LED screens. During COB, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of red, green and blue LED crystal particles are packaged on a single printed circuit board. -Using the latter integrated LED splicing unit is obviously more difficult than surface-mounting three-primary-color LED lamp beads.
