Avago Technologies, a supplier of analog interface components for communications, industrial and consumer applications, announced an innovative ultra-thin, high brightness, light guide film (LGF) technology for backlighting mobile applications such as cell phones, handheld games and GPS applications. According to the company, the new light guide technology will help designers reduce the number of LEDs needed to illuminate backlit keypad applications without compromising brightness and light uniformity.

As mobile handsets have incorporated more capability and functions, the user interface of mobile handset devices and keyboards have become more cluttered and complex for the end user. To address this situation, Avago has developed a patented Graphic Fusion Multimode Exchangeable (G2MEX) technology to solve the issues of complexity and congested icons on keypads and keyboards. This backlighting solution from Avago, allows key characters to be overlapped and selectively illuminated. Moreover, the illumination areas are transparent to each other – an area will be invisible when it is not backlit. G2MEX is an ideal choice for phones with MP3 players or any multi-function handset, especially those with capacitive sensing keypads.

Conventional backlight solutions use six or more top-firing LEDs, but with a light guide just two side-firing LEDs are necessary to backlight display icons uniformly. As a result, with fewer LEDs, the system uses less power, requires less printed circuit board (PCB) area and has a longer battery life. Typical applications that are ideal for Avago’s light guide solution include Plunger on LGF, multi-segment backlighting, and Graphic Fusion Multi-Mode Exchangeable applications.