New LED Backlight Technology to Make LCD TVs Even Thinner

We've already gotten accustomed to seeing the thickness of LCD TVs decrease with each new generation, and it seems that 2009 will bring even "skinnier" TVs to the market. And that's because the Taiwan-based Global Lighting Technologies company has developed a very innovative new technology that will help manufacturers reduce even further the size of their HDTVs, especially the widescreen ones.

Thus, as Shinichi Kato from Nikkei Electronics (TechOn) informs us, at FPD International 2008, the aforementioned company showcased both a light guide plate intended for use in 52-inch LCD TVs (1.5mm thick and weighing around 1.89 kg), as well as a 46-inch LCD panel that employed the same basic technology.

What's really different about these light sources is the fact that they are placed in the lower part of the panels, which means that the electronic components that were previously located on the back of the panel can be relocated to other parts of the TV set, thus making it a lot slimmer. Global Lighting Technologies has provided very little details regarding the peculiarities of this technology, but it did mention something about microlens arrays.

As mentioned earlier, in order to provide an example of what this technology could do in real life, the Taiwanese company also presented a 46-inch LCD panel, which featured 126 LED light sources located at the bottom and was equipped with a 5mm-thick light guide panel. This unit provided a luminance level of 6000 cd/m2, a luminance uniformity of 85%, while the color gamut was of around 100% NTSC standard. The weight of the unit was around 8.5 kilos.

Global Lighting Technologies plans to commercialize this backlight unit in 2009, which means that we're most likely to see the first products that use this revolutionary technology by next year's end.

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