Mini LED Backlight Highlights

In recent years, Mini LED display technology has become popular and has become one of the mainstream technology routes after LCD and OLED, covering the entire chain market from giant screen projects to XR virtual reality micro-displays, and confronting OLED technology head-on.

The editor noticed that recent research statistics predict that in 2024, Mini LED backlight TV shipments will increase by 55% year-on-year to 6.35 million units, higher than the 6.23 million units of OLED products, which increased by 15.9% year-on-year. This is the first sub-category that Mini LED has won and has huge sales performance in the field of direct confrontation between the two, which means that it is accelerating its advantages.

However, the Mini LED display that currently surpasses OLED is in the form of LCD backlight. The future market of OLED is getting weaker and weaker, and Mini LED is rapidly increasing in volume. Is this the trend of display technology?

1. Why is Mini LED more popular?

OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode. Compared with LCD TV, its most obvious difference is the point light source used, so there will be no halo, light leakage and other phenomena at all. The picture quality is much better than that of traditional LCD TV. OLED has therefore become the most popular display technology route after LCD.

However, after years of practice, the shortcomings of OLED technology have not been solved very well. Because of the luminous material, the brightness of OLED is relatively low, the screen life is short, and "screen burn-in" may occur. Most importantly, the cost of OLED screens is extremely high, and large-screen TV products used in the era of large screens are often expensive.

Mini LED technology changes the surface light source of traditional LCD into a point light source with zoned light control, and uses more micro lamp beads as the light source, thereby greatly improving the brightness and contrast of the display.

After continuous technological iteration, the picture quality of Mini LED is now no less than that of OLED, whether in terms of peak brightness, contrast, color gamut, etc., all of which are outstanding. More importantly, Mini LED display technology has a long service life and low cost, which will naturally be more popular with mass consumers.

In the past few years, the shipments of Mini LED TVs have been catching up with OLED. When consumers think that the display difference between the two is "almost imperceptible" and the price of OLED TVs is much higher than that of Mini LED TVs, it is natural that Mini LED will surpass OLED and continue to grow rapidly.

Judging from the latest market situation, although the top manufacturers are still pushing OLED, these measures have failed to hinder the further growth of Mini LED TV shipments. For companies, more Mini LED panels may be launched in the future than OLED.

Of course, OLED TV shipments are also expected to grow, but Mini LED TV shipments are expected to grow exponentially, reaching more than three times that of competitors. Such a gap will make Mini LED technology more and more advantageous.

Currently, the Mini LED TV market is mainly led by Samsung Electronics, Hisense and TCL worldwide. Considering that Chinese manufacturers represented by Hisense and TCL are constantly challenging the industry status of Korean display giants, the rise of Mini LED is not only due to the competition for display technology routes, but also the changes in the industry landscape.

Admittedly, the higher-end OLED technology is still one of the best display technologies in the current display field. However, the more price-competitive Mini LED not only takes into account the many advantages of OLED technology, but also shows stronger "combat effectiveness" in terms of user experience and market popularity.

The development of OLED technology requires not only innovation, but also the price reduction under economies of scale, which is the national route. Otherwise, if the high-end price is too high, it may be ruthlessly abandoned by the market.

2. Main advantages of Mini LED backlight display

In general, Mini LED backlight display has the following advantages:

1) By adopting smaller and denser LED chips, higher brightness (significantly better than LCD and OLED) can be achieved, making it easy to achieve better HDR effects;

2) The number of partitions can be flexibly selected according to product positioning, and fine dimming can be achieved through partition light control technology, significantly improving contrast;

3) By matching QD quantum dot film, a wider color gamut can be achieved, and the effect is very close to OLED;

4) By upgrading the packaging technology to reduce the optical distance, the display can be made thinner and lighter;

5) The dark area can reduce the brightness or turn off the partition, reducing power consumption and saving more power.

Main differences between various display technologies

3. Mini LED backlight

Mini LED backlight control requires the combination of backlight control chip (DCON) and backlight driver chip (Dimmer).

Generally, each screen requires a DCON, which acts like a "master switch" to control the backlight source.

Dimmer can be divided into single channel, 4 channels, 8 channels, 16 channels and other types. One channel corresponds to one partition, and one partition can cover multiple LED lamp beads.

In general, the higher the number of partitions, the finer the picture quality and the better the display effect such as contrast. At the same time, with the increase in the number of LED chips and the number of partitions, the cost of LED chips and driver chips in the Mini LED backlight module will also increase accordingly.

In PM mode, when there are enough partitions, the backlight module may have problems such as difficult wiring, a large number of ICs without placement space, complex wire connection, and high cost.

The AM solution can support more partition arrangements and meet the requirements of higher display quality by making small IC size and narrower line width wiring.

PM drive VS AM drive solution architecture

In the AM drive mode, the LEDs of each partition can be controlled independently at the same time, and each partition will not interfere with each other, which is easy to achieve high partition, high brightness, high contrast, and high refresh rate. Compared with the PM scanning mode, it has the advantages of no flicker and healthy eye protection. It can also be used with a single-layer PCB or glass substrate, which is suitable for hundreds to tens of thousands of partitions. The overall cost is also the lowest. It is the preferred solution that has gradually matured and mass-produced in recent years.

Several driving methods of Mini LED backlight

In the past few years, most of the Mini LED backlight design solutions on the market adopted PM direct drive or PM scanning, which made it difficult to balance cost and performance, and the driver chips were mainly imported.

The maturity of the AM drive solution is the key breakthrough point for cost reduction.

According to our calculations, when the Mini LED backlight module adopts the AM drive solution in the middle and high partitions, due to the cost savings in driver chips, PCB substrates, cables, etc., it saves about 40% of the cost compared with the PM constant current solution, and the cost advantage is obvious, so it is favored by terminal manufacturers.

In summary, Mini LED backlight has become a new driving force for the innovative development of the display industry, and its demand and applications are constantly rising. In the future, Head Sun will continue to build on its own advantages and collaborate with colleagues in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain to expand more technical possibilities and segmented application scenarios, and provide customers with more complete and reliable Mini LED backlight solutions.

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