The nascent global augmented reality market is expected to exceed $60 billion in 2023, and offers a lot of growth opportunitites. We expect Augmented Reality to become a part of everyday life as AR smart glasses will make people more connected than ever, in real time, with hands-free and heads-up toward the world. They will also be used to increase productivity for companies in most industries. The race to produce the first pair of commercially successful augmented reality glasses is on, but all products present major drawbacks such as low brightness, low resolution, big size, small field of view, reduced eye box resulting in limited experience. All major drawbacks are linked to microdisplays' weaknesses. Many miniaturised components from the smartphone industry can be integrated into smart glasses but the display is the bottleneck and the main challenge for manufacturers. Current commercialized microdisplays will never meet requirements to produce cutting-edge smart glasses. A new generation of microdisplay has to emerge. MicroLED technology, the same LED technology which revolutionized general lighting 10 years ago but scaled down to microscale pixels, is the most promising solution and must be developed. MicroLED displays have the potential to change everything as they can offer unparalleled higher brightness, a better reliability be more compact, offer lower latency, provide better contrast ratio and be energy efficient compared to current display technologies. This is exactly what the AR smart glasses market needs. Our latest breakthrough innovation will bring the solution by allowing the fabrication of full color RGB matrices for high-end microdisplays, completely adapted to cutting-edge augmented & mixed reality smart glasses. It is a great opportunity and a good timing to scale-up Novagan in the global microdisplay market.

Although the market demand of displays bright enough to allow the diffusion of readable information against a very bright landscape is important, in particular in the avionics application, existing technologies still do not allow the desired brightness combined with very low power consumption and very compact volume. In this context, the HiLICo project aims at developing a new generation of monochrome and full-color emissive GaN micro-displays with 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution (WUXGA), 8-μm pixel pitch, very high brightness (over 1MCd/cm²) and good form factor capabilities that will enable the design of ground breaking compact see-through system for next generation Avionics applications. To achieve this aim, HiLICo will address the following challenges: 1. development of high-quality GaN based LED epilayers designed to fulfill targeted demonstrator performances; 2. design and fabrication of an active matrix in advanced Complementary metal oxide semi-conductor (CMOS) technology to control each individual pixel; 3. coupling of the LED structure and the CMOS, building a monolithic structure on which LED arrays will be fabricated with high precision, thus making monochrome, active-matrix, high-resolution GaN microdisplays; 4. addition of colour converters (quantum dots and 2D Multi-Quantum Wells layers) on such blue emitting devices, for fabricating bi-color and full-color display demonstrators; 5. design and manufacture of the electronics followed by the test and evaluation of the complete micro display device. First demonstrators will be qualified for future commercialisation. The technology developed will contribute to the increase of European competitiveness, through the rapid and important deployment of innovative products on the microdisplay market, as well as Head-Up Displays, Head-mounted displays and smart Eyewears. The consortium gathers 1 RTO, 1 large company and 2 SMEs. They will mobilise a grant of 4 091 583 € with an effort of 283 PM.

Cochlear implants are the first and currently most successful sensory rehabilitation strategy, and equip thousands of hearing impaired patients. However, they suffer from strong information throughput limitations, making music perception and speech intelligibility in noise impossible, extremely detrimental to implanted patients. In this project, we propose to establish a clear proof of concept for a radically new auditory rehabilitation strategy by direct stimulation of the main sound processing center in the brain, the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex not only offers one order of magnitude more interfacing surface, to boost information throughput, but it is also a plastic structure, adaptable to complex auditory codes, which could benefit from acoustic information preprocessing by modern artificial intelligence algorithms. To demonstrate that cortical implants are feasible and outperform cochlear implants, artificial sound perceptions will be optogenetically generated via an LED display placed over the full extent of auditory cortex in behaving mice. Perceptual precision for a wide range of acoustic features will be precisely benchmarked against cochlear implant thanks to a range of psychophysical assays available in this animal model. The benefits of sound preprocessing by machine learning algorithm s(deep learning networks) will be tested, and we will develop a new generation of ultrathin, flexible, biocompatible LED displays, that could be placed on the convoluted surface of human auditory cortex to activate precise and rich perceptions. Together, these brain-interfacing and bioelectronics innovations will enable a new implant strategy in that promises to be a major changer for hearing restoration quality in deaf patients, and pave the way for improvement of other sensory restoration strategies.