April 30, 2025 By Anjana Govil Sr. Director, Smart Mobile Devices, GlobalFoundries Smart glasses were a hot topic at CES 2025 and are being touted as the next big category in wearables. Counterpoint Research estimates global smart glasses shipments to increase significantly, from under 3 million units shipped in 2024 to nearly 45 million units shipped annually by 2030. In the past year, the smart glasses industry has transformed with sleek, lightweight designs and a variety of features easily controlled by voice commands as well as integrated micro-displays. The evolution of smart glasses Initial smart glasses technologies had limited appeal with consumers. Enabling only audio and camera capabilities that come standard on modern smartphones, these gadgets were seen as a niche play with few additional use cases. With the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and advancements in micro-display capabilities that can be integrated into smart glasses, their appeal has drastically increased. These advancements address needs that do not have elegant solutions today. From general consumer use cases like real time translation and navigation to more specific uses like summarizing notes in a meeting or tracking key health parameters for athletes, these next generation of AI-enabled smart glasses are unlocking new frontiers and applications that consumers may not have imagined. As technology further evolves, several vendors believe that full Augment Reality (AR) glasses could be the next personal computer, offering a mobile and personalized way to work, connect and entertain. Though the journey to mainstream full AR glasses is still further away, smart glasses are making an indelible mark in the wearable device market. Real estate and power challenges Nearly 3 billion people across the world use glasses, and most are accustomed to very light weight frames (< 35 grams) that can be worn comfortably throughout the day. This constraint has created significant real estate challenges and power consumption limitations for all functional additions to smart glasses such as cameras, displays, and batteries. These challenges have spurred the adoption of new micro-display technologies that can meet the space and power figures of merit (FOMs) while providing the brightness needed to enable displays in ambient light. This innovation in display technology is crucial for the advancement of smart glasses. Innovation in displays addressing these challenges A lot of incumbent display technologies struggle to fight against sunlight and those that do are relatively power hungry like Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) based displays. Innovation in micro-displays like microLEDs have enabled extremely bright displays (>1 Mnits) at the ultra-low power consumption needed for AI glasses with extremely small footprints. MicroLEDs are self – emissive, so only the pixels that light up consume power. This is helpful in smart glasses where you are displaying contextual information that needs only limited field to view (FOV) to ~ 20-30 degrees and doesn’t require all pixels to light up. Over time, as technology evolves and becomes more efficient, we expect these limited FOV glasses to evolve into full AR displays (large FOV > 70 degrees). MicroLED construction and GF solutions – 28SLPe and 22FDX+ MicroLED displays are typically constructed with 2 wafers: a front plane based on GaN LEDs and a CMOS backplane to help drive the LEDs. Let’s delve deeper into how GF’s differentiated technologies are enabling these advancements. GF offers 28SLPe and 22FDX platforms offer key features to enable very compact, ultra-low power CMOS backplane designs: GF’s 28SLPe and 22FDX+ platforms enable in-pixel drivers with 1.8V and 3.3V devices. Both platforms offer dense SRAM bit cells enabling 6-10-bit color depth in 2 – 4um pixels, enabling customers to optimize their design for pixel pitch, resolution and color depth to cater to different performance/price segments of the market. For always-on devices and applications that need to optimize power consumption, 22FDX+ helps minimize both active power and leakage power with low-voltage SRAM and the inherently low leakage in the FD-SOI transistor. GF offers innovative, custom pixel cell designs to meet the growing density requirements for microLEDs. Lastly, GF enables superior device matching performance to minimize brightness variation across the pixel array. MicroLED manufacturing also involves stringent requirements on wafer bow, warpage, roughness and planarity to enable various bonding approaches that customers use. GF is partnering closely with our customers to help support their requirements for their specific bonding approaches including supporting different wafer surface finishes. We are also enabling a roadmap with TSVs to enable interconnections and reduce solution size. GF’s front end of Line (FEOL) capability, metallization stacks and back end of Line (BEOL) solutions optimized for microLEDs have led to partnerships with several leading vendors to enable the next generation of micro displays with 28SLPe and 22FDX. Looking ahead, the future possibilities for smart, AI-enabled glasses are vast and exciting. Future Possibilities We except future smart glasses to offer enhanced AR experiences, better battery life, and more intuitive interfaces. Longer term, this is just a step in the journey towards spatial computing where full AR glasses can be used with large visual real estate, entertainment and more. We expect these advancements to complement today’s computing experience by facilitating tasks done on PCs, tablets and smartphones. As we envision the future of spatial computing with full AR glasses, GF is committed to serving display applications across all existing and new markets. This includes LCD and OLED displays as well as next generation micro displays across consumer, automotive and industrial applications where GF has a history of continued investment and innovation: OLED DDIC / TDDI for smartphones, smartwatches – GF has a broad portfolio of solutions for display driver integrated circuits (DDICs) and touch and display driver integration (TDDI) with our 28HV, 40HV and 55HV platforms. GF is also developing our 22FDX+HV platform to address power concerns for next generation mobile devices and automotive applications. TCON for display drivers, including AI-enabled displays with integrated sensor functions – GF offers multiple solutions for timing controllers with our 22FDX, 28SLPe, and 40LP process technologies that are purpose-built for high performance compute. MicroLED backplane for automotive HUD – GF offers 28SLPe and 22FDX+ that are auto qualified and enabled with customized features for dense, low power microLED heads up displays (HUD). The possibilities are truly endless. Following our success with developing essential chip technologies for modern smartphones, cars and more, GF is well positioned to address the growing role smart glasses and AR glasses will take in reshaping how we interact with our world. For more information on how GF can help you build your next generation smart glasses or advanced display devices, you can contact us anytime through gf.com.
