Delta Electronics company chairman Bruce Cheng said his company has established an R&D team to develop LED backlight technology, according to a story that appeared on DigiTimes today. The company has already delivered some samples to customers, Cheng said.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of MDTV Retailer

Although Delta makes most of its money making power supplies, it is very familiar with the market for backlight units (BLUs) for LCDs since it makes about 6M cold-cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) units per month. (Delta’s CCFL capacity is fully booked, and the company intends to triple monthly output this year by adding 12 CCFL production lines to the 18 lines it currently operates in Taiwan and mainland China.)

Because, Cheng said, LEDs still have higher production cost than CCFLs and produce more heat, Delta will initially concentrate on developing LED BLUs for small LCD panels intended for automotive applications. Although Cheng sees LEDs as eventually being the future technology for mainstream LCD-TV BLUs, he doesnt see them as taking a substantial market share for the next four to five years.

Insight Media takes a more aggressive view. On the basis of painstaking technology and cost modeling of entire BLU structures, we believe that LED BLUs will command more than half of the 32-inch BLU market in 2009. (Larger sizes will take a bit longer.) The modeling and analysis is laid out in detail in Insight Media’s LCD Backlight Report.

Our analysis is a bit contrarian to conventional wisdom regarding the penetration of LED backlights into LCD-TVs. But our conclusions are founded in a solid analysis of LED device price-performance modeling, developed in our LED Projection System Report, plus a fundamental analysis of backlight technology and architectures. There is a tremendous amount of development activity in all of the technologies and architectures to support the roll out of cost effective LED backlights for larger LCD-TVs, which we believe, will happen faster than most people think.