Tianma showed a number of microLED products, almost all focused on the automotive market. The most striking demonstration was a microLED head-up display imager running at a measured 120,000 nits.  At that luminance level, the system can project onto a standard, highly transparent windshield without requiring a darkened zone at the base of the glass — the approach that has historically been required for LCD-based and even some microLED-based panoramic HUD (pHUD) systems to maintain acceptable contrast in daylight conditions.

The panel is a 12-inch microLED unit at 1,500 × 256 resolution, built on an LTPS backplane. The demo is explicitly a process capability proof point, not a production-ready device. Specifically, the panel does not yet have the full dimming range required for an automotive product — the ability to dim from peak output down to approximately 1 nit for nighttime driving is a regulatory and usability requirement that this prototype does not yet meet. Thermal management is the other open engineering challenge: driving a microLED imager at 120,000 nits generates significant heat that must be dissipated within the substrate, and that becomes an engineering constraint once the optical and process work is resolved.

Tianma also showed their 7.05-inch transparent microLED panel in two configurations: as a back-to-back display and as a 19-inch, wide-aspect panel composed of three tiles. The 19-inch demonstrator featured new processing of the edges to make the seams nearly invisible along with other improvements.

A 3-inch round microLED display was shown to allow auto developers to think about adding this to the steering wheel or as a retro-style analog gage.

Also on display was a 27-inch microLED display composed of a 2×4 array of 8.9-inch microLED panels. These are lower resolution and aimed at direct-view videowall applications.  At CES, Tianma showed the tiling of multiple 27” modules to create a 108” 4K display.