Shining a new light on the LCD experience

Today, the vast majority of televisions around the world use LCD technology - and for good reason. Beautiful picture quality pairs with ever-growing screen size, all while remaining accessible to consumers everywhere.

We believe LCD technology will continue to dominate the industry, and we're always looking for new ways to improve. We have our sights set on optimizing the backlight unit (BLU), where we see opportunity to extend display technology through the glass stack.

The conventional BLU acts like a singular light bulb, shining light from the back of the glass stack through layers of glass, film, and liquid crystal. Swapping that light bulb for an array of MiniLEDs can offer a number of important benefits.

• Superior brightness: A MiniLED backlight unit is "direct-lit," meaning the light source is more efficient and powerful than a traditional BLU.
• Better contrast: Using many light sources instead of just one allows lights to be fully turned off when part of the display picture is meant to be dark or black. This is called local dimming and with MiniLEDs in the backlight unit, this can be done with precision.
• Reduced thickness: MiniLEDs produce as much light as a traditional BLU but with less thickness. Additionally, using a glass substrate rather than plastic for a light diffuser allows set thickness to be reduced because glass needs less space to expand and contract.

Advanced flat glass has two key roles in enabling these backlights of the future. Corning pairs deep expertise in light management with pristine fusion-formed glass substrates to offer an optimized solution for a patterned glass diffuser. This glass substrate can reduce the number of necessary LEDs - and the associated cost - in a MiniLED BLU, ultimately reducing BLU thickness by up to half.

Each of these benefits may also interest automotive display designers, who are looking to bring high-quality displays to an environment that's constantly affected by changing light conditions. Excellent brightness and contrast are key when both direct sunlight and deep darkness are likely to occur during the viewer's interactions.

Ready to read more about Corning's ongoing exploration of MiniLED backlight units? The Society for Information Display (SID) recently published two technical papers written by Corning experts. SID members can ready the full papers here:

• Integrated Ultra-Thin Direct-Lit LCD Backlight Using Glass Components
• Development of a highly reliable Mini-LED display module using simultaneous transfer and bonding
  (SITRAB) technology