Mini LED backlight display, featuring high brightness, contrast, reliability as well as longer lifetime, is regarded as a great competitor to OLED display, which is the current dominant display technology for high end consuming electronics. But higher production cost is still a pain point for Mini LED backlight display. From the viewpoint of the supply chain, driver ICs that control the local dimming zones of Mini LED backlight display could actually be a critical component to help reducing production cost.

The increased production cost of Mini LED comes from the massive amount of smaller LED chips employed to deliver advanced display performance. In the structure of Mini LED backlit display, Mini LEDs serve as backlight sources are arranged in arrays to form different dimming zones that enable full brightness or darkness for the above LCD display to achieve high brightness and contrast.

(Local dimming enables full darkness and higher contrast compared to global dimming)

Take a 65-inch Mini LED backlit TV for example, it takes more than 100 thousand Mini LED chips to create more than 1000 dimming zones. Transferring and bonding all these LED chips onto backplane as well as designing driving solution for them with more drive ICs lead to boosted manufacture cost for Mini LED backlight displays.

Aiming to cut down the production cost and make Mini LED backlight technology more compatible to OLED, industry players are trying all the ways possible to optimize their cost structure.

The options include turning the driving plan from passive matrix to active matrix, improving transferring yield by using advanced materials, as well as employing driver ICs with enhanced efficiency.

Active matrix driver plan allows simplified product design and reduced number of driver ICs. With active matrix, one driver IC can correspond to more dimming zones comparing to passive matrix. Production cost is thus lowered down.

More market strategies and technology solutions of Mini LED and Micro LED display will be presented at 2020 Micro LED Forum: Opportunities and Challenges for Mass Production of Emerging Display Technologies. Seize the final chance to get the early bird discount and register now!