MICLEDI Microdisplays and Kura Technologies Announce Partnership on Custom Micro-LED Display for Ultra High-Performance AR glasses, Scaling with Partners Including GlobalFoundries and TSMC

MICLEDI and Kura's partnership marks the next milestone in delivering the best-performing AR glasses at scale to enable broad adoption

SAN FRANCISCO and LEUVEN, Belgium, Oct. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MICLEDI Microdisplays, a leading developer of microLED displays for augmented reality (AR) glasses, and Kura Technologies, a world leading innovator in AR headsets today announced a collaboration to manufacture AR glasses. The new glasses are designed by Kura and incorporate MICLEDI's unique 300mm microLED displays to achieve the performance required for Kura's next generation of AR glasses. Based upon Kura's proprietary architecture from the chip level up, these next generation glasses feature groundbreaking performance capabilities.

The two companies have been working together for over a year with MICLEDI providing Kura early access to advanced microLEDs under a closely held collaboration. Kura was the one of the first customers to receive microLEDs from MICLEDI, enabling them to build and test their unique approach for driving and controlling microLED displays for AR glasses.

Under the partnership, MICLEDI will continue to provide Kura access to devices built in its 200mm fab as well as provide Kura with early access to customized blue, green, and red devices as they come from their 300mm wafer foundry.

"MICLEDI is pleased to be an integral part of Kura's innovation journey," said Sean Lord, MICLEDI CEO. "It is very rewarding to serve the needs of a nimble, fast-paced customer like Kura, and it has us a better company. We've had a chance to visit Kura's office in the Bay Area, meet their team and see their latest developments and demos. We were very impressed by their progress over the years, the multi-disciplinary technical expertise and the field-of-view and clarity of their demos."

"Kura's fast-paced product engineering team has benefited tremendously from MICLEDI's quick-turn 200mm prototype fabrication capability and responsive team of professional LED design and process experts," says Kelly Peng, founder, CEO and CTO of Kura. "More importantly, though, we feel that MICLEDI is well-positioned to achieve industry leadership in 300mm microLED fabrication, offering process advantages and direct compatibility with our high performance custom 300mm backplane."

According to the market analyst company, Yole, the overall global AR market is estimated to reach $88.4 billion (USD) by 2027 with a compounded annual growth rate of more than 30% from 2021 to 2027 and beyond as it becomes the next consumer platform.

"In May of this year, we announced a partnership with GlobalFoundries to bring our proprietary 300mm microLED designs into high volume, low cost, mass production. Working with Kura should provide mutually attractive timing and mass production ramp plans for both MICLEDI and GlobalFoundries," added Lord.

Kura's proprietary architecture enables dynamic defect correction, 100x resolution expansion, and can tolerate 10,000x the defect rate and 5x the uniformity variation of their competitors enabling them to go to market with high performance, 8K AR glasses with the micro-LED panels that can be built now and in the next year, not several years from now.

"The partnership with GlobalFoundries allows us to take advantage of their expertise in large-scale, reliable manufacturing in order to reliably ramp our glasses to the 100,000's of units our customers are demanding. We're excited to be the only AR company we're aware of that is working with such a large foundry to build our custom microdisplays." said Bayley Wang, co-founder and technical lead of Kura. "Combined with the successful tape-out of our custom mixed-signal display driver IC which is the world's fastest micro display driving IC at our partner TSMC, we're on track to reliably build our displays and launch our product at scale."

To learn more please visit MICLEDI at www.micledi.com or Kura at www.kura.tech.

MICLEDI Microdisplays is a fabless developer of microLED display modules for the augmented reality (AR) market. The company was spun-out from IMEC, a highly respected Belgian R&D center, in 2019. MICLEDI's technology is based on an innovative combination of III/V materials processing, 3D integration and 300mm silicon-based processing combined with a proprietary ASIC to provide a self-contained, compact monolithic AR display with high image quality and power efficiency. For more information, visit www.micledi.com.

Winner of a 2022 CES Innovation Award as well as Best of CES 2022, Kura is building the world's best-augmented reality glasses, and global telepresence/remote collaboration platform, using its proprietary display system with a custom micro-LED micro-display, customized silicons, and customized AI-generated optics that enable:

• 150° field-of-view (10x that of major AR glasses),
• 8K resolution (4x existing),
• 95% transparency (4x existing),
• High brightness, outdoor-viewable images with no color breakdown or front light leakage.
• Compact eyeglass form factor that weighs only 80g.

The company has over 350 customers, predominantly Fortune 100 and 500 companies in diverse sectors including automotive, smartphone, telecom, entertainment, medical, and enterprise software. Founded in 2016, Kura is headquartered in Silicon Valley and is led by a team of industry veterans, with over 50 percent of founding leadership from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and three of its lead engineers hold over 400 patents.

For more information, visit www.kura.tech, contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Kura Technologies