Saphlux is a microLED developer that use a photonic lattice and quantum dots for their red microLEDs – their so-called Nano Photonic Quantum Dot (NPQD) devices. Larger-sized NPQD devices have already been commercialized for the digital signage market, but they have been developing devices for use in AR glasses as well. In Q2’25 they released their T3 full color Hybrid-QD device. The device and AR glasses specifications are shown below.

The Hybrid-QD device is fabricated by wafer bonding a blue epi layer to the CMOS backplane along with a second wafer-bonding step to add the green epi layer. Above this sits the NPQD structure with red quantum dots. This design is more complex than the previous non-hybrid device as only the blue epi layer was wafer bonded.

At the Bay Area conference “Seeing is Believing”, speaker Chen Chen noted that they are using 6” GaN-on-silicon for the wafer bonding with a plan to move to 12” in a new fab in 2027. GaN-on-silicon is getting much better, he noted, with fewer defects than sapphire. Over 30% of the area is defect-free now.

In terms of light output, the blue and green microLEDs can reach 1M nits, but the red is still limited to 100-150K nits yielding a white luminance of 250K to 500K nits (quantum dot limitation). Lifetime for the device was quoted as 3000 hours to T90 when driven at the 0.7 lumen level. On the roadmap is what appears to be a pixel-shifting approach to create a virtual resolution that is fours times that of the physical resolution of the microLED device. Also being considered is a 1.4” device with 4K x 4K resolution and 400K of luminance once the 12” fab is on-line.