At the Society for Information Display Symposium and Exhibition in San Francisco, which closed yesterday, Global Lighting Technologies (GLT) (Brecksville, OH: www.glthome.com) and Luminus Devices, Inc., (Woburn, MA; www.luminus.com) celebrated their recently announced partnership by showing a prototype backlight for LCD-TVs that promises to bring the era of high-volume LED backlighting considerably closer.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer and
Mobile Display Report

The two companies showed a 24-inch backlight consisting of 5 modules, each with 3 RGB LED triplets. The LEDs are the bright PhlatLight units with a photonic lattice that extracts much more light from an LED. Without the lattice, a lot of of the light is normally trapped in an LED’s structure. Similar Luminus LEDs powered all of the LED-lit rear-projection TV prototypes shown at CES in January.

GLT provides light-guides with patterns of MicroLenses that conduct the light and evenly redirect it through the LCD panel, even over large distances from the light sources.

This architecture should allow large-size LCD panels to be edge-lit, as opposed to the direct backlighting used in most current LED backlights for TV-sized displays, resulting is dramatically reduced LED count, and simplified color and thermal management.

The prototype shown at SID had its light-guide blades oriented vertically. Succeeding versions will have the blades oriented horizontally to permit backlight scanning. Over the next few months, the number of LEDs will be reduced to one RGB triplet per blade, David DeAgazio (Director of Sales Worldwide at GLT) told Insight Media. The intention is to backlight a 32-inch LCD-TV that formerly required hundreds of LEDs with only 12 PhlatLight triplets.

The companies are talking to potential customers now, and prototype TV sets could appear in 1H’07, DeAgazio said.

In our Backlight Report and elsewhere, Insight Media has been more bullish than other analysts in predicting a relatively early penetration of LED backlights in large LCD-TVs. Although we didn’t anticipate the Luminus-GLT announcement, this is the sort of architecture that motivated our projection. The partnership of these two companies could well be a technological marriage made in heaven.