Are there any sort of 3 legged LED's that would have a Vcc pin, a ground pin and a input/trigger pin with an integrated current limiting, input buffer, and mosfet drive so it can be directly interfaced with a ttl or cmos circuit without a driver chip?
When you use a resistor with a MCU port output pin to drive an LED, the user, (end customer) can choose what brightness level they want, by suitable choice of resistor.
E.g. Outdoors needs to be much brighter than indoors.
Some people like them bright, some medium, some low level brightness, etc.
Your smart LED, does not seem to give the user any choice on brightness level ?
If your answer was to be, use PWM, what if the MCU has got only 4 or 6 PWM's and wants to have 8 smart LED's, at a particular brightness level ?
If the LED's cost $0.25 to make (I'm NOT 100% sure how much they will be from your posts), adding in some other costs and profit etc.
They must surely then be $0.50 each ? (if not more)
So if you sell them on a crowd funded website, with say 100 LEDs or 500 LEDs in a pack, the charges would be .....?
100 * $0.50 = $50 + postage for 100 smart LED's
500 * $0.50 = $250 + postage for 500 smart LED's
So a $50 pack of x100 smart LED's + postage
Or $1/$2/$3 pack of x100 normal LED's + $0.50 resistors
tl;dr
I don't think e.g. $250 for a pack of x500 smart LED's would get many customers. So reaching your apparent goal of 2,000,000 smart LED's may not be practicable.
Also LED's use up limited/valuable MCU I/O pins. Sometimes designs have plenty of spare I/O pins, other times, way too few. So using LED serial Driver chips, also means that a few I/O pins can drive as many LED's, e.g. twenty, as you like, all from a few (serial) I/O pins.
When using Matrix LED's, this becomes even more important.
Final point. It would need, by the sound of it, at least three connections for the LED, power, ground and input. That would mean extra cost as well, for packaging the LED's.
There could well be scope/market for some new types of LED's. Because addressable ones (already on the market), which can create easy matrix LED displays, with adjustable RGB colours, and maybe other features. Might be a significant market segment.
But just giving a normal LED, a schmitt trigger input, does not seem to make it worth the (probable) MASSIVE increase in cost per LED, (I'm guessing $0.50 or even $1 each, as opposed to existing ones for $0.10 or considerably less, especially in quantity), so I'm skeptical it should be put on the market.
Schmitt triggers, are usually used for counting circuits, such as flip-flops, counters, and to help debounce input switches. LED's seems to be a bit of a strange use for Schmitt trigger inputs.