💡Seoul Viosys Starts Mass Producing Rare-Earth-Free White LED Chips at 10µm

Your white LED supply chain just got a lot less fragile

Seoul Viosys is about to make white LEDs without rare earths or packaging. Its WICOP 3 chip generates white light directly from gallium nitride, and mass production starts in fourth-quarter 2026. The catch? Nothing about this is off the shelf yet. If you build hardware, displays, or anything that depends on rare-earth phosphors, this is worth tracking. The chip has no plastics, no silicone, and no synthetic organic materials, which means fewer supply chain headaches and a product that can last for decades. For AR and interconnect teams, the bigger deal is that these micro-emitters can carry high-volume AI data over distances from under 1cm to tens of meters. The numbers are the real story. A 25µm x 10µm micro-LED already hits close to 100lm/W, and the company is targeting 200lm/W within two years. Production cost is roughly half of a conventional white LED. Omdia and others project AR plus this tech could create a $60bn market within five years, while the current white LED market sits around $10bn. Watch the efficacy milestones. Hitting 200lm/W is the difference between a neat lab result and something you can design into a product.