Macroblock

The " International micro-LED Display Conference ", which was originally held at the same time as the " Touch Taiwan and Smart+ Exhibition", is not affected by the COVID-19 epidemic this year. It is held on August 27 (Thu.) at National Chiao Tung University as scheduled. Mr. Li-Chang Yang, chairman of Macroblock, Inc. was invited to be the speaker and talked about " mini-LED Technology Used in Backlight and Direct-View Displays ".

Mr. Yang’s speech mainly covers three parts: Blooming Market for mini-LED Technology, Technology and Benefits of FALD Mini-LED Backlight Driver IC, and Technology Leadership in Large Scale Direct-View LED Displays. We summarize in the following sections.

Blooming Market for mini-LED Technology 
The discussion and investment of mini-LED in various applications has become a hot topic in the past three years. In just a few years, it has brought new R&D directions and industrial business opportunities to the supply chain including: fine pitch LED display manufacturers, panel manufacturers, and even driver IC design houses, supporting equipment and material manufacturers. mini-LED is mainly targeted at "direct-view display" and "backlight" applications. Benefited from these two major applications, the mini-LED market is expected to grow rapidly. The overall mini-LED output value in 2023 will exceed US$1 billion according to LEDinside estimates.

At CES 2020, in view of the specifications of the large direct displays exhibited by ten leading brands, there are several characteristics:

1. The main LED chip size is 75-300 micrometers
2. COB is mostly used for packaging
3. The pitch is mostly 0.6-0.7 mm
4. The driving method is mostly passive driver
5. Most display backplanes use printed circuit boards

The large-size TVs exhibited by Konka, TCL, and Samsung are adopted with Macroblock's driver ICs. Macroblock is the primary brand for 100-150 inch direct-view display driver ICs.

Technology and Benefits of FALD mini-LED Backlight Driver ICs
Macroblock adopts Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) to develop mini-LED backlight technology. Compared with the previous LCD backlight with global dimming, the method of turning on and off all the backlight sources at the same time, the Full Array Local Dimming brings fine image quality, higher contrast and resolution comparable to OLED. However, good image quality results from the cost increased by a large number of LEDs and driver ICs. In order to balance image quality and price, Macroblock’s driver ICs can drive more LEDs with the mature scanning architecture, greatly save the total number and cost of additional driving circuits.

Technology Leadership in Large Scale Direct-View LED Displays
The reasons why Macroblock is currently the first choice for large-size direct display driver ICs are:
● Meeting super fine pitch requirements with high integration architecture, high channel count and high scanning drive technology.
● Achieving low power consumption goals with low operating current and low voltage technology.
● Using microampere current to improve the seven common problems of scanning LED displays to present excellent image quality.

The " International micro-LED Display Conference " has been held for several years. Upstream and downstream companies in the industry are invited every year to share their progress in the development of next generation display technology. With the continuous progress, positive competition is formed to jointly push the industry forward.