Dr. Nikhil Balram has over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor and display industries. Past executive roles include CEO of EyeWay Vision Inc., a startup developing immersive AR glasses, Head of the Display Group at Google, responsible for developing display systems for all Google consumer hardware, including AR and VR, CEO of Ricoh Innovations Corporation, VP and GM of Digital Entertainment BU at Marvell and CTO of the Display Group at National Semiconductor.
He has received numerous awards including the Otto Schade Prize from the Society for Information Display (SID) and a Gold Stevie® Award for Executive of the Year in the Electronics category. Dr. Balram is recognized as a Fellow of the SID and was General Chair for Display Week 2021 and Program Chair for Display Week 2019. Dr. Balram received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and has served on the faculty of three major universities.
Tell us about your company?
Mojo Vision is developing and commercializing high-performance micro-LED display technology for consumer, enterprise, and government applications. The company combines breakthrough technology, leading display and semiconductor expertise, and an advanced 300mm manufacturing process to deliver on the promise of micro-LED displays. Mojo’s proprietary quantum-dot (QD) technology brings full color capability to our display platform and meets the performance demands for all form factors. Mojo Vision developed the world’s smallest, densest dynamic display for the first augmented reality (AR) smart contact lens and is now applying this innovation and expertise to lead the disruption of the $160B+ display industry. Our beachhead market is AR and we are laser focused on supporting big tech companies with our microdisplay development.
What problems are you solving?
There are several problems that we are solving but for conciseness, I will focus on two critical ones for our beachhead AR customers – brightness and efficiency. A big problem today for our customers is efficient generation of light. Only a small % of original light input is transmitted in AR glasses which means that AR requires an extremely high level of brightness, particularly to be effective in sunlight. Brightness levels need to start with one million candelas per square meter (cd/m2); with that amount of light, conventional quantum-dots that are used in TVs degrade significantly. For TV applications, QDs are facing a light flux of 4 to 8 milliwatts per cm squared but in AR applications, QDs are facing between 4 and 8 watts per cm squared, a thousand times more! At Mojo, we created red and green QDs that solve this lifetime issue for micro-LED applications. For example, we published results from testing red QD film using a power density of 4 watts per cm squared—1,000 times more than a TV – and our red QD film showed flat emission with no degradation for 500 hours and took thousands of hours to degrade to the 80 percent emission level that is sometimes used as a measure of lifetime. That meets initial benchmarks from AR customers; it’s worth noting that a conventional red QD film degraded to 60 percent emission in only 80 hours in the same test setup.
What application areas are your strongest?
As a component supplier, we don’t necessarily have end applications; rather, we support our customers who are building products for their customers, i.e. the end-users. We believe our micro-LED technology will be a platform that serves many different market segments – augmented reality, light field displays, smart wearables, smartphones, televisions, laptops, automotive heads-up displays, high-speed data connectivity in data centers, 3D printing, the list abounds! Any application that needs really tiny, highly bright, and incredibly efficient light sources can benefit from our technology. I mentioned earlier that our beachhead market is AR. For AR to truly scale, the form factor needs to look and feel like the eyeglasses most people wear today, and the industry continues to push for smaller, less obtrusive headsets and smart glasses. This is where we think our micro-LED technology adds the most immediate value and offers a significant advantage over current display technologies like OLED and LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon). The 4µm pixel size in Mojo’s current generation of monolithic RGB panels is critical to enabling a lightweight, compact display, which will be key to making glasses fully ‘smart’ without sacrificing visual-appeal and comfort.
What keeps your customers up at night?
It varies depending on the specific market our customer serves. For those in the AR market, the competitive landscape is intense and constantly evolving. These customers are concerned with staying ahead of their tech rivals by integrating cutting-edge technology and offering value to their end-users. Balancing the right tradeoffs of form factor and performance is a critical worry. The market also has some uncertainty, and the AR hype cycle has left many investors and end users cautious. Customers need to ensure their devices are not only innovative and scalable but also reliable and widely accessible to gain a foothold in this nascent market.
For those in the mass display market (e.g. TVs, laptops, etc.), the main factors keeping them up at night are the pressure of strong competition and aggressive cost management. In a sector characterized by thin margins and high volume, the race to offer the best price-performance ratio is always on. These customers are constantly seeking ways to reduce product costs while maintaining the highest standards of display quality. The need to innovate and differentiate their products without significantly increasing cost is a delicate balancing act.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The competitive landscape in the display market is both dynamic and challenging with a number of strong, established incumbents in traditional display technology (e.g. LCD) and a growing number of players in micro-LED display technology. Micro-LED companies are racing to overcome technical hurdles, achieve mass production, and deliver displays that surpass existing technologies in terms of brightness, efficiency, and color accuracy.
Mojo Vision stands out in the field through several key differentiators:
- High Performance Quantum Dot (HPQD): We use properietary QD technology to provide vivid color and high brightness with high reliability. We own the entire end-to-end process for QDs – making, integration, testing – and effectively have a QD company nested within Mojo Vision!
- Stable Supply Chain: In an industry where supply chain disruptions can significantly impact production timelines and costs, our reliable supply chain offers a distinct advantage. We have established strong partnerships and a geopolitically stable supply chain, which has become a requirement for many large customers in the US and Europe.
- Full Display System Expertise: Unlike many competitors who focus solely on certain elements of a display, we have comprehensive expertise in the entire display system. This holistic approach allows us to optimize every aspect of the display system, from CMOS backplanes to tiny LEDs to custom microlens arrays.
- Very Tiny, Very Efficient LEDs: Our micro-LEDs are not only incredibly small (much smaller than a red blood cell!) but also highly efficient. This combination results in displays that are more energy-efficient and capable of delivering superior performance in compact form factors.
By focusing on these differentiators, we provide our customers with cutting-edge micro-LED displays that meet the highest standards of quality, performance, and size, helping them stay ahead in a highly competitive market.
What new features/technology are you working on?
As a startup, we must prioritize our resources and not “boil the ocean” so we are very focused on our beachhead market of AR, bringing a suite of microdisplay products to this next year. These microdisplays also have applicability to other markets such as light field displays and Auto head-up-displays (HUD). We just announced a partnership with heads-up display (HUD) company CY Vision to develop HUDs with micro-LED technology for the automotive industry. These HUDs will leverage artificial intelligence and 3D imaging to provide drivers an immersive and personalized driving experience with informative, line-of-sight overlays that promote driver safety and provide essential information.
At the same time, we are working to develop and validate our concept of Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) chiplets. Mojo’s innovation here will enable cost-effective large format display production by significantly increasing the number of LEDs per wafer and simplifying the mass transfer process. Traditional mass transfer process is complex, requiring LEDs from separate red, green, and blue wafers to be transferred to an intermediate substrate, and then to a final substrate. Our single RGB wafer with tiny RGB chiplets results in 3x fewer transfers per display and 10x+ more pixels per wafer, which means much lower costs.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
We engage directly with customers throughout the year through the deep connections established through our individual experiences in the semiconductor, display and AR/XR industries. Our focus is on customers who are leaders in their respective segments, rather than trying to engage with everyone. Also, we do presentations at several industry conferences, including keynotes, tutorial seminars, panel discussions, and invited papers and articles, that keep our customers, partners and competitors informed of our industry-leading progress.
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