With nearly 200 million yuan in financing, this company uses lossless Micro-LED to accelerate the full-color AI glasses

"Qiushui Semiconductor" has recently completed Pre-A and Series A financing, totaling nearly 200 million yuan. This round of financing was led by Zhaohui Capital, followed by Commerce Fund, Shengyu Investment, Ningbo Talent Development Fund, Jiayi Venture Capital, Emerging Technology, Digital Optical Core and Xingtang Capital, with Xingtang Capital serving as long-term financial advisor. This round of financing will be mainly used for the construction of an 8-inch hybrid bonding mass production line in Ningbo High-tech Zone and subsequent R&D investment.

"Qiushui Semiconductor" was established in November 2022. It is a semiconductor company focusing on Micro-LED micro-display chips and modules. Its products cover digital car lights, AR glasses, micro-projection and other application fields. The company's headquarters was originally located in Suzhou, but has recently moved to Ningbo.

Micro-LED is often considered an important direction for the next generation of display technology, but the mass production process has been stuck on the chip side in the past few years. According to IDC data, global shipments of AR/VR headsets and display-less smart glasses will exceed 14 million units in 2025. However, the shipment volume of AR glasses with display function is less than one million. In the field of digital car lights, TrendForce analysis pointed out that the market penetration rate of adaptive headlights (ADB) is expected to reach 21.6% by 2029, and car manufacturers such as Porsche have begun to adopt Micro LED pixel module headlight solutions. The mass production bottleneck on the chip side is the main obstacle to the implementation of these two applications.

The key to this situation lies in the technical route. In the past, the traditional solution used a 4-inch sapphire substrate, first connected the LED wafer to the driver circuit through metal bonding, and then divided the pixels through etching. However, the etching process will cause damage to the luminescent material, resulting in a significant decrease in chip efficiency, low yield, and excessive light emission angle, making it difficult to achieve large-scale mass production. Since 2024, the industry has begun to shift to the 8-inch wafer-level hybrid bonding process, but there are still very few companies that have truly broken through the mass production link.

Therefore, Qiu Shui Semiconductor’s solution no longer etches the luminescent material, but avoids material damage from the source through the innovation of lossless chip architecture. With the 8-inch silicon substrate and hybrid bonding 3D packaging process, the chip yield can be increased to more than 6N, the light emission angle is narrowed from ±60° to ±10°, and the operating temperature range is expanded from below 50°C to over 140°C.

Qiushui "Leyu" AR series module (picture source/enterprise)

In terms of products, "Qiushui Semiconductor" has previously launched a 0.61-inch digital car light chip and completed customer sample verification. At the same time, AR single green chips are scheduled to be shipped this year. "Qiushui Semiconductor" founder Jiang Zhenyu judged that "monochromatic green light chips can already meet the needs of specific scenarios such as swimming goggles, conference prompts, translation, and car navigation. In the next year, the shipment volume of AI glasses with display functions is expected to increase from the current four to five million units to ten million units. The ability to ship tens of millions of chips is still a challenge. In addition, Micro- In the "iphone moment" of the LED industry, the problem of colorization must be solved. Traditional red Micro-LED chips have lost more than 97% of their light efficiency due to etching damage, which is an obstacle that cannot be bypassed. Lossless technology is the key to solving this problem and the key to opening the door to colorization. "Qiushui Semiconductor" is expected to achieve a technological breakthrough in colorization by the end of the year. ”

Qiushui “Leyu” AR series module (picture source/enterprise)

In the domestic competition landscape, different development paths have emerged in the field of Micro-LED chips. One is the IDM model that builds an entire 8-inch or 12-inch line by itself, but the line construction cycle is long and usually takes two to three years or even longer to achieve stable mass production. The other type is the Fab-lite model of "Qiu Shui Semiconductor", which means that except for the hybrid bonding link, which is built independently due to the lack of mature foundry platforms in the world, the rest of the processes are completed using existing mature semiconductor foundries. According to Hard Krypton’s understanding, “Qiushui Semiconductor” is the first domestic start-up company to complete the 8-inch hybrid bonding process line.

Currently, "Qiushui Semiconductor" is building an 8-inch hybrid bonding production line in Ningbo High-tech Zone, which is expected to be opened in October this year. According to Jiang Zhenyu, after being put into operation, it can produce thousands of 8-inch wafers per month, corresponding to the annual supply capacity of more than 10 million Micro-LED chips. In addition, the company's hybrid bonding vertical stack architecture has realized the interconnection of optical chips and electrical chips within 3.75 micron pixels, and the spacing can be reduced to 2 microns in the future, which is at the same process node as Huawei's recently released "Tao's Law" advanced hybrid bonding process.

As for the team, Dr. Jiang Zhenyu, the founder of "Qiu Shui Semiconductor" graduated from Pennsylvania State University and is engaged in the research of semiconductor optoelectronic materials and devices. He has 15 years of experience in technology R&D and team management. He has served as a senior scientist at Dalian Dehao Optoelectronics, the R&D director of Foshan Guoxing Semiconductor, and the R&D director of Shenzhen Third Generation Semiconductor Research Institute. He is also a member of the Ministry of Science and Technology's major new display expert group. Its co-founder has 8 years of entrepreneurial experience in high-power LED car lights. The core members have worked for Huawei HiSilicon, Yangtze Memory, Intel and other companies, and have research and development experience in hybrid bonding and advanced packaging processes.