Mini LED in backlighting and display is most likely to form a product breakthrough

Compared with Micro LED, MiniLED has more opportunities for short-term large-scale commercial use, especially in the LCD backlight field. It is expected to gradually form a product breakthrough from 2019.

A high-density FHD display has 1920 rows x1080 columns, about 2 million pixels, and each Pixel is subpixel red, green, and blue, so there are about 6 million deaths.Six million grains smaller than the diameter of a human hair are cut and pasted onto a substrate, a process known in the industry as mass transfer, in which large amounts of light-emitting diode grains are transferred to the display substrate.Therefore, it is extremely difficult to transfer large amounts of Micro leds.

Mini LED short-term large-scale commercial opportunities are greater.In the past, LCD USES side-light backlight, which reduces the cost and power consumption, but the biggest weakness of this method is the inability to adjust the brightness of a certain area of the picture.Because of the torsion effect of liquid crystal, the 0,1 control of the full switch cannot be realized.Therefore, the contrast ratio of side-light liquid crystal panel is usually only a few thousand or so, even if the dimming technology is applied. 

Mini LED can take advantage of the existing LCD technology base, combined with the same mature RGB LED technology, develop a new generation of backlit panel design.In terms of performance, AMOLED TV panel can be comparable to AMOLED TV panel in terms of picture quality, thickness, cost, irregular cutting and curved display, and is expected to be a potential competitive solution for large-size AMOLED display.Once MiniLED backlight technology is applied at large scale, it will greatly increase the consumption of LED chips and have a large commercial market prospect.

Mini LED turns dozens of LED beads of side light backlight into tens of thousands of direct lower backlight. With local dimming design, its HDR fineness reaches an unprecedented level.At present, Mini LED design can be divided into full-color RGB mixed light or white light. The former can achieve 100%NTSC high gamut display, while the white Mini LED through blue LED and phosphor powder can achieve 80-90% NTSC display effect.In CES 2018, innolux first exhibited 10.1 "AM MiniLED by a real machine, and believed that AM MiniLED with soft substrate is the best solution to the backlight required by special-shaped/curved LCD.

According to calculations, it is assumed that the penetration rate of MiniLED backlight is 1% in 2018, and 15 million mobile phones use MiniLED backlit screens, so the demand for MiniLED chips will reach 60 billion, and the demand for 1.2 million 2-inch chips will be met.Assuming that 4% of TV panels are equipped with MiniLED backlighting in 2018, the demand for MiniLED chips will reach 100 billion, and the demand for about 2 million 2-inch chips will be met.According to the forecast, the Mini LED market space will exceed $1 billion in 2023. 

Taking a 6-inch phone panel as an example, ruifeng optoelectronics said in a statement that the current LCD panel with ordinary LED backlighting costs about $20 to $30, flexible OLED costs about $80 to $100, and LCD panel with Mini LED backlighting costs about $40 to $50.Mini LED backlighting also has a cost advantage over OLED panels.

Mini LED backlight demand calculation

Hypothesis 1: currently, the size of Mini LED backlight chip is 8*12 and 6*20, etc., so the area of Mini LED backlight chip is about 110mil^2.

Hypothesis 2: assume that 80% of the area of 2-inch chip is converted into effective chip, and the area of 2-inch chip is 3140000mil^2, (3140000/110)*0.8, that is, a 2-inch chip corresponds to 22837 backlight chips;

Requirement measurement of MiniLED display

Hypothesis 1: the mainstream size of Mini LED RGB chip is 5*9, and the cost can be reduced to 3*6 in the future. It is assumed that it will be 5*9 in 2019, 3*6 in 2020, 35% 3*6 in 2020, and 3*6 in 2021, 65% 3*6.

Hypothesis 2: assume that 80% of the 2-inch chip area is converted into effective chips, and the 2-inch chip area is 3140000mil^2, (3140000/45)*0.8, that is, a 2-inch chip corresponds to 55822 5*9 display chips, (3140000/18)*0.8 corresponds to 139556 3*6 display chips.Mini LED (similar to Micro LED) displays the most potential screen in the future 4k display, which requires about 24 million LED chips

In conclusion, it is predicted that the total demand of 2 inch Mini LED will reach 107 million in the next three years.The demand for Mini LED backlit 2-inch and Mini LED display 2-inch tablets increased from 1,021,100 and 1,424,000 in 2019 to 13,887,200 and 92.95 million respectively in 2021.Market demand growth space is huge.