Micro light-emitting diodes (microLEDs) are an emerging directly emissive display technology. Compared with organic LED and liquid-crystal displays, microLED displays offer advantages in terms of brightness, colour, minimum pixel size and lifetime. Single-micrometre-emitter sizes and pixel pitches also mean that microLEDs can be used to create novel display applications such as near-to-eye technologies and pico-projectors. Here we review the development of microLEDs, highlighting key performance characteristics that suggest that microLEDs could be the next prominent display technology in consumer electronics. We examine the three leading microLED manufacturing approaches—monolithic integration, mass transfer and nanowire growth—and consider their most likely use cases. We also highlight current microLED system demonstrations and consider the potential future applications of microLED technologies.

微型发光二极管 (microLED) 是一种新兴的直接发光显示技术。与有机 LED 和液晶显示器相比，microLED 显示器在亮度、颜色、最小像素尺寸和寿命方面具有优势。单微米发射器尺寸和像素间距也意味着 microLED 可用于创建新颖的显示应用，例如近眼技术和微型投影仪。在这里，我们回顾了 microLED 的发展，重点介绍了表明 microLED 可能成为消费电子产品中下一个突出显示技术的关键性能特征。我们研究了三种领先的 microLED 制造方法——单片集成、传质和纳米线生长——并考虑了它们最可能的用例。