CI Lumen Enhances LCD Brightness with Low-Power LED Backlighting
CI Lumen Industries announced that it now offers a patent-pending LED backlighting solution for a variety of display panels. CI Lumen's light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting technology successfully addresses engineers' concerns for power consumption and heat relevant elevated brightness levels and may be applied to LCD panels produced by virtually any manufacturer. In addition to the advantages of LED backlighting for sunlight readability applications, the solid-state nature of LEDs also makes them more suitable to harsh environmental conditions, such as extreme cold, shock and vibration. These advantages, together with increased reliability and longer lifetimes, make them particularly well-suited for military and heavy industrial applications.
CI Lumen's LED backlighting solution was developed for hi-bright panels requiring brightness levels of 800 nits or more – a requirement for outdoor viewing, in particular. CI Lumen's proprietary solution is well-suited for panels produced by a broad spectrum of manufacturers, ranging in size from five to 19 inches and hibrighted to 800 to 1300 nits at industry leading low power levels. For example, a typical 15-inch panel retrofitted with CI Lumen's LED backlighting technology at 1000 nits would consume only 24W of power, while a solution using cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) of equivalent brightness would require 65W. CI Lumen's LED backlighting technology operating at these reduced power levels can be employed while successfully maintaining thermal levels comparable to the original specifications of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) panels.
In addition to the primary advantages of power consumption and maintenance of thermal properties, LED backlighting creates a number of advantageous side effects. Because LEDs do not require an inverter, EMI emissions can be reduced. Additionally, no heater is needed as with CCFLs so LEDs can be turned on to full brightness immediately. This can be particularly beneficial in harsh environment applications, such as military systems used in extremely cold environments where immediate activation can be critical. Additionally, LEDs offer environmental advantages, such as simpler RoHS compliance.
The improved ruggedness of LED backlighting versus traditional CCFL methodology results in a significant increase in reliability and product life. Because a solid state LED is inherently less fragile than a glass tube filled with pressurized gasses, shock and vibration test results demonstrate improvements of greater than an order of magnitude. Life testing at equivalent brightness levels has produced similar and improved results with common product lifetimes of 60,000 to 100,000 hours with little or no degradation. Even at end-of-life, the wear out mechanism is non catastrophic, such as a single lamp in an array failing as opposed to loss of the entire backlight function with a CCFL solution.
