A novel lens cap designed for the RGB LEDs installed in an ultra‐thin and directly lit backlight unit of large‐sized LCD TVs

Abstract— The objective of this study is to design a novel cone‐shaped lens cap on LEDs in order to achieve high optical efficiency in an ultra‐thin directly lit RGB LED backlight unit (BLU) for large‐sized LCD TVs. The use of the novel lens cap could play the role of a diffuser, a low light‐efficiency component in a BLU, in order to gain higher efficiency and simultaneously provide satisfactory uniformity in light distribution. The novel cone‐shaped lens is coated with aluminum on the outside surface of the cone for mirroring effects to reflect most of the LED emitted light horizontally and then reflect the light at the BLU boundaries, and then, finally to the output plane. In this way, bright spots on the output plane of the BLU can be avoided, leading to increased uniformity. Simulations were conducted to design and optimize varied aspects of the designed lens and BLU, including the cone angle of the proposed lens and the LED spacing (pitch). To further achieve color balance, a known Genetic Algorithm is used to search for the optimal angular placement of each RGB LED, resulting in better color balance. Finally, a prototype BLU for large‐sized 37‐in. LCD TVs with the proposed lens was built to verify the expected performance.     

Color performance of an MVA‐LCD using an LED backlight

Abstract— The color performance, including color gamut, color shift, and gamma curve, of a multi‐domain vertical‐alignment (MVA) liquid‐crystal display (LCD) using an LED backlight are calculated quantitatively. Simulation results indicate that an LED backlight exhibits better angular color uniformity and smaller color shifts than a CCFL backlight. Color gamut can be further widened and color shift reduced when using a color‐sequential RGB‐LED backlight without color filters, while the angular‐dependent gamma curves are less influenced using different backlights. The obtained quantitative results are useful for optimizing the color performance and color management of high‐end LCD monitors and LCD TVs.     

提高汽车背景光大面积照明亮度一致性的光源布置

汽车背景光系统广泛应用LED光源进行照明,单颗LED近似为点光源,在较大面积照明的情况下,LED光源的布置方式在很大程度上影响了亮度的一致性.研究了LED作为背光源的照明特点,分析了LED背光源的布置对汽车背景光亮度一致性的影响,提出一种通过优化光源布置确定相邻LED间距提高汽车背景光较大面积照明亮度一致性的方法.该方...     

Design and fabrication of a micropatterned polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) light‐guide plate for sheet‐less LCD backlight unit

Abstract— A polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) light‐guide plate (LGP) having micropatterns with an inverse‐trapezoidal cross section was developed for a sheet‐less LCD backlight unit (BLU). The micropatterned PDMS LGP was fabricated by backside 3‐D diffuser lithography followed by two consecutive PDMS replication processes: photoresist‐to‐PDMS and PDMS‐to‐PDMS replications. The fabricated LGP showed an average luminance of 2878 nits and a uniformity of 73.3% in a 2‐in. backlight module with four side‐view 0.85‐cd LEDs. It also could feasibly be applied to a light source for flexible displays owing to the flexible characteristic of the PDMS itself.     

Luminance enhancement without sacrificing the viewing angle in a direct-lit backlight by addressing the angle-dependent characteristic of the prism film

In a conventional backlight, suppression of light loss caused by the prism film(s) is desired to enhance the luminance without sacrificing the viewing angle. In this paper, in a direct-lit light-emitting diode (LED) backlight, where an LED array is placed under the display panel, the transmission efficiency against the prism film(s) is investigated for incident light with different zenith and azimuth incident angles. A strong angle-dependent characteristic is found, even when the reflective recycling effect is available. To address this angle-dependent characteristic in a direct-lit LED backlight, a freeform lens is designed to deflect the light emitted from an LED into the incident angle range with high transmission efficiency. Two design examples are implemented by adopting dual- and single-layer prism film(s). The simulation results show that the freeform lens can enhance the on-axis luminance by 26% and 35%, respectively, while the viewing angle remains nearly unchanged. Furthermore, using a single layer of prism film, a 19-in. direct-lit LED backlight module is constructed for experimental verification. By fabricating the freeform lenses and adding them to the backlight module, the on-axis luminance is enhanced by 24%, and the viewing angle is decreased by no more than 2°. Finally, the influence of the diffusers, which causes the experimental results to degrade slightly compared with the simulation results, is analyzed.     

Physical‐based photon mapping for an LED backlight lighting simulator

Abstract— Liquid‐crystal displays (LCDs) have become increasingly popular due to their lower price and larger sizes. In particular, backlights having an RGB LED source have recently attracted attention, because they have a wider color gamut, higher luminance, and lower power consumption. However, even when the backlight area is uniformly covered with light modules based on arrays of individual LEDs, this does not ensure a uniform chromaticity and luminance over the backlight panel, thereby stressing the need for lighting simulation of the backlight. Accordingly, this paper proposes an effective lighting simulator to predict the chromaticity and luminance distribution of an LED backlight panel for an LCD. First, the spectrum‐based photons are all initially generated using a random function with a constraint satisfying the spectral power distribution of the actual LED light sources, while their emitting directions are determined based on a pre‐calculated probability using a random variable angle. The optical characteristics of the inner sheets in the LCD backlight structure are then modeled using the wavelength and incident angle to predict the next direction of each photon based on the reflection and transmittance at an intersection. All the photons that reach the unit area of the outward panel are gathered to shape their spectral power distribution, then converted to CIEXYZ values and multiplied with a color‐matching function. Finally, a realistic image visualization of these CIEXYZ values is achieved through standardized device characterization using the sRGB mode. Experiments confirm that the proposed spectrum‐based photon mapping can effectively predict the chromaticity and luminance distribution of an LED backlight panel, providing a good lighting simulation of an LED backlight before manufacturing the LCD.     

Backlight unit with double‐surface light emission using a single micro‐structured lightguide plate

Abstract— A novel illumination system for a liquid‐crystal‐display (LCD) module used in a dual‐display cellular phone has been developed. A double‐surface light‐emitting backlight uses a single light‐guide plate to illuminate both LCDs. A single lightguide, two prism sheets, and four light‐emitting diodes (LED) were used in the new structure, compared with ten components and two sets of light sources with six LEDs in the current backlight. The thickness and power consumption of the new backlight were reduced by a factor of 0.59 and 0.67, respectively.     

High-efficiency nanowire light-emitting diodes for augmented reality and virtual reality displays

Through 3D dipole cloud model, RGB (red, green, and blue) nanowire light-emitting diode (LED) structures are geometrically optimized to exhibit a narrower radiation pattern, weaker angular color shift, and higher optical efficiency. In comparison with micro-LEDs whose external quantum efficiency is dependent on the mesa size, these RGB nanowire LEDs are more efficient than micro-LEDs when the chip size is below 20, 80, and 10 μm, respectively. As a result, nanowire LED is a promising candidate for augmented reality and virtual reality displays where high-resolution density and efficient directional light emission are desired.     

用LED实现高亮度超薄型背光源的设计方法

近年来随着LED产业的发展,LED光源在背光应用领域也在不断拓展。本文主要从LED直下式背光源的结构特点探讨,如何提高亮度和均匀性,用光学软件模拟了用大功率白光LED实现高亮度和均匀性的背光模组,用实验数据验证了最初理论结果。并对LED直下式结构模组和LED侧入式结构模组的优缺点进行了对比和全面分析,及直下式LED背光结构在背光源系统的各个领域广泛应用的必然性。     

Thermal management of edge‐lit wide color gamut backlight for LCD using red laser diodes and cyan LEDs

The color gamut is one of the critical parameters that dictate the image quality of displays. The liquid crystal displays using white color light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) as the backlight, though having been widely employed recently, are not very satisfactory in terms of their color gamut because of the broad spectrum inherent to white LEDs. This prompted the authors to develop improved liquid crystal displays using an edge‐lit wide color gamut backlight that used red laser diodes and cyan LEDs. Generating laser beams with high color purity, the laser diodes are light sources with a significant effect on expanding the color gamut. However, laser diodes, red ones in particular, have unfavorable thermal characteristics. To cope with this shortcoming, the authors clearly defined the restrictive criteria for laying out two kinds of light source on the edge‐lit backlight and made a prototype 55‐type laser backlight for performance evaluation.     

Advances in automotive interior lighting concerning new LED approach and optical performance

Automotive interior lighting has to follow general trends in lighting and will therefore evolve toward hundreds and even thousands of RGB LEDs per car. Creating mood at day and night, pixelated sign‐like information, and theater‐like effects like welcome and goodbye messages are examples for outstanding user experience. Furthermore, safety features such as warnings and driving state are a must for autonomous cars. It requires new concepts for the whole interior lighting system to reach premium quality such as data rate (beyond today's bus standard for lighting), support for safety rules, compensation of temperature effects, daylight performance (including huge dimming range for night drive), uniformity in terms of luminance and color along the light guide, and mixing of red, green, and blue (RGB) with white. We report a new automotive RGB light‐emitting diode (LED) system that fulfills the above requirements and saves effort as well as cost by calibration before integration. Extensive studies were performed for daylight threshold evaluation with subjects and methods for judging on uniformity for direct‐lit RGB light guides based on the contrast sensitivity function and Gaussian fit of the LED luminance profile.     

Wide gamut LCD using locally dimmable four‐primary‐color LED backlight

This paper proposes a wide gamut LCD using locally dimmable four‐primary‐color (4PC) LED backlight. Although the color gamut of LCDs has been improved in recent years, it is insufficient to reproduce all the colors in the real world. The objective of this paper is to propose a wide gamut LCD that reproduces all the colors in the real world while keeping the cost increases to a minimum. We evaluated the color gamut reproduced by LEDs of multiple primary colors and selected cyan as the optimal color to be added to the three primary colors to reproduce all the colors in the real world. Therefore, we designed an LED backlight consisting of an additional only‐cyan LED with three‐primary‐color LEDs and developed a prototype LCD with 4PC LED backlight. Furthermore, we developed a local dimming algorithm for the 4PC LED backlight. As a result, we confirmed that the prototype LCD with the 4PC LED backlight is able to cover almost all the colors in the real world and also able to display natural images with highly saturated colors by local dimming.     

Brightness management in a direct LED backlight for LCD TVs

Abstract— A method of calculating the luminance and luminance uniformity of a bottom LED backlight is proposed and demonstrated. Both the power consumption and brightness uniformity as a function of screen brightness, screen size, backlight thickness, transmittance of the LCD panel, reflective cavity efficiency, gain, cone angle of the enhancement films, LED array configuration, and the average luminous flux, radiation pattern, and input power of individual LEDs. Moreover, a 42‐in. LCD TV using this backlight design approach was fabricated. The bottom backlight incorporates an array of RGGB 4‐in‐1 multi‐chip LEDs within a highly reflective box behind a diffuser and a dual brightness‐enhancement film. The brightness uniformity can be predicted within an accuracy of 94% and the luminance level within an accuracy of 96%.     

Novel transmissive color filter using cholesteric liquid crystal with wide viewing angle

Abstract— A new design for a cholesteric liquid‐crystal (CLC) color filter has been devised. Since this system absorbs no light, it uses backlight energy very efficiently. When CLCs of this type with an expanded selective reflection band are combined with light sources with sharp RGB emission peaks, such as LEDs, it is possible to reduce the dependence of color shift on viewing angle and make more efficient use of light.     

Power‐saving primary design for displays enclosing a target color gamut

Abstract— Display primaries are optimized for the trade‐off between the total primary power and color gamut under the requirement that a target color gamut is enclosed by the color gamut of the display. LED displays and HDTV color gamut are taken as examples. Compared to the display using a set of typical commercial RGB LEDs, it was found that a total optical (electrical) power of 23.6% (15.6%) can be saved for the display using optimal RGB LEDs. Although the size of the display color gamut is sacrificed, the color gamut of the display using optimal RGB LEDs still encloses the HDTV color gamut. The combined effect of the LED luminous efficiency and white‐point condition on the determination of the optimal LED wavelengths and bandwidths is also studied.     

The study of integrated LED-backlight plate fabricated by micromachining technique

Generally, a backlight unit (BLU) is considered for the light module of a thin film transistor (TFT) LCD. A typical BLU is comprised of a light guide plate (LGP) and some optical sheets, such as two diffusion sheets, two prism sheets and a reflection sheet. To make the traditional BLU thinner and brighter, we develop an integrated LED-backlight plate (BLP) on microstructures-based, which combine several functions of optical sheets to save the space and fabrication process. The microstructures and the reflective thin film are constructed on the BLP by using micromachining and hot-embossing techniques in the research. From the results of luminous measurements, the luminous uniformity of 86.1% of our fabricated BLP has achieved a demand of a general panel. In future, the micromachining BLP could make the LED-backlight thinner, brighter and lighter for mobile phone applications.     

A novel diffractive backlight concept for mobile displays

Abstract— Power‐efficiency demands on mobile communications device displays have become severe with the emergence of full‐video‐capable cellular phones and mobile telephony services such as third‐generation (3G) networks. The display is the main culprit for power consumption in the mobile‐phone user interface and the backlight unit (BLU) of commonly used active‐matrix liquid‐crystal displays (AMLCDs) is the main power drain in the display. One way of reducing the power dissipation of a mobile liquid‐crystal display is to efficiently distribute and outcouple the light available in the backlight unit to direct the primary wavelength bands in a spectrum‐specific fashion through the respective color subpixels. This paper describes a diffractive‐optics approach for a novel backlight unit to realize this goal. A model grating structure was fabricated and the distribution of outcoupled light was studied. The results verify that the new BLU concept based on an array of spectrum‐specific gratings is feasible.     

Transmitting scalable video coding using VLC with color and dimming control to assure QoS

Recently, light emitting diode (LED) technology has been the focus of the information technology and green technology industries.The visible light communication (VLC) system uses LED technology for simultaneous illumination and data transmission. Therefore, the VLC system provides illumination to the user, which can provide both high quality multimedia services and various application services. The main concerns of VLC systems are illumination and bit error rate (BER) performance. Consequently, it is necessary to analyze the illumination control and method of transmitting multimedia data in the VLC system. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively transmit and Red, Green, Blue (RGB) three-color LED to video signal while providing dimming and color control from the VLC system. In the VLC system, LEDs can generate various colors of light by controlling the mixing ratio of each individual RGB color element. Thus, each RGB channel will have a different signal power, and each channel will have different performance. Therefore, we present a novel resource allocation using the RGB channel state information to allocate the multi-layers of video in the VLC system. The conventional system allocates the fixed channel to a scalable video coding (SVC) signal. However, the proposed system allocates a high priority to the SVC signal channel.As a result of computer simulation tests, the proposed system can improve the BER performance compared to the conventional system.     

LED‐backlight feedback control system with integrated amorphous‐silicon color sensor on an LCD panel

Abstract— Thin‐film‐transistor liquid‐crystal displays (TFT‐LCDs) have the largest market share of all digital flat‐panel displays. An LCD backlighting system employing a three‐color red‐green‐blue light‐emitting diode (RGB‐LED) array is very attractive, considering its wide color gamut, tunable white point, high dimming ratio, long lifetime, and environmental compatibility. But the high‐intensity LED has problems with thermal stability and degradation of brightness over time. Color and white luminance levels are not stable over a wide range of temperature due to inherent long‐term aging characteristics. In order to minimize color point and brightness differences over time, optical feedback control is the key technology for any LED‐backlight system. In this paper, the feasibility of an optical color‐sensing feedback system for an LED backlight by integrating the amorphous‐silicon (a‐Si) color sensor onto the LCD panel will be presented. To minimize the photoconductivity degradation of a‐Si, a new laser exposure treatment has been applied. The integrated color‐sensor optical‐feedback‐controlled LED‐backlight system minimized the color variation to less than 0.008 Δu'v' (CIE1976) compared to 0.025 for an open‐loop system over the temperature range of 42–76°C.     

LED‐backlit computer screens influence our biological clock and keep us more awake

Abstract— In commodity LC flat‐panel displays, the traditional CCFL backlight is being replaced more and more by LEDs. The typical spectrum of LED‐lit displays shows a significantly higher amount of blue light in the range around 464 nm. Blue light in this wavelength area suppresses the melatonin level in humans and thus effects the biological clock. Our hypothesis was that the amount of blue light reaching the human eye from a LED‐backlit display is sufficient to have a significant effect on the biological clock. The results of clinical user studies comparing the effects of LED‐ vs. CCFL‐backlit displays on humans, resulting from the emitted amount of 464‐nm light, will be presented. It was found that the LED‐backlit display causes significant suppression of melatonin, which effects the biological clock of the test persons, indicating the necessity for displays with a controllable 464‐nm emission. A technical concept for a display with such functionality will be presented.