adding brightness control for cheap tft lcd factory
For the video display developer LCD panels are available in many sizes and resolutions, they are also available with many choices of maximum brightness. The following considers the topic of LCD panel brightness, the choices, the methods for adjusting brightness and some brightness adjustment scenarios.
LCD panels are generally rated as to their maximum brightness level which is expressed in Nits, it is equal to Candela/sqm (cd/m2), and this will be at a particular color temperature as noted in the specification, usually 10,000 K. In terms of a practical understanding, the following is a rough guide:
Outdoor displays range from a low end of 700 nits to typically 1,000 or 1,500nits and up with 2,000~2,500nits and even up to 5,000nits seen with some models. This may include standard LCD panels, custom LCD panels as well as custom cut LCD panels.
Virtually all LCD panels have a LED backlight these days, these are powered by an LED driver board. Brightness control via the driver board will be by one of two methods:
PWM (Pulse Width Modulation): This varies the duty cycle of the backlight “on time” – it is predominant in modern LCD panel LED backlight designs to enable support for digital brightness controls.
Analog: Uses a simple variable voltage to adjust brightness, for example this might be a dial or slider type potentiometer / variable resistor. To see how to enable analog backlight adjustment visit: https://www.digitalview.com/blog/brightness-adjustment/
One of the advantages of LED for the backlight is the range of adjustment that is possible, however it is important to note that the range varies significantly from model to model. Some industrial panels can be turned to very low light levels making them suitable for use in special environments such as at night. Lower cost panels limit the range of brightness to what might be required for typical usage, whereas panels with full range dimming from full off to full on require more complex backlight drivers.
Backlight lifetime: Many LCD panels have a backlight lifetime rating of 50,000 hours (typically measured to half brightness), this can be extended by running the LED backlight at a lower brightness level. Some panels may only offer 30,000 hours as a lower cost solution while other panels may offer up to 100,000 hours for high end applications.
An LCD panel backlight may be constructed so the LED’s are mounted directly behind a light guide diffuser, or they may be mounted along one or more edges of the light guide.
Active backlight: This is a function of some LCD panel backlights to automatically adjust the backlight brightness in response to the image. For more advanced systems there is an LED array making up the LED backlight, this adjusts the brightness in areas localized to the image being shown. This can greatly enhance the brightness across the display and is being used primarily with video, for example on consumer TV sets. It is not useful to all image types, for example a spreadsheet or content like maps or data is not likely to benefit.
Local dimming: Some LCD panels with direct LED may support local dimming so the LED’s are dimmed in response to the image close to them. This will not be at the same resolution as the LCD panel itself but will help greater contrast over the display by enhancing the brightness in bright areas of the image and darkening the image in dark parts of the image.
Both of the above techniques are likely to be more beneficial to certain types of content than others. For example a movie is likely to benefit more than a spreadsheet.
For the LCD monitor manufacturer it is important to consider that any covering over the LCD panel will reduce the brightness. For example the protective glass over a digital signage display, or a touch screen, or a semi-silvered mirror. So if a specific brightness is required the measurement should be taken with these in place.
There are various relatively low cost brightness meters available, typically in the couple of hundred dollars range. It is difficult to comment on the accuracy of these but we have found them to be within 5% of each other, though more importantly they do appear to be quite consistent in measurement so good for measurement comparisons. For more accurate measurement there are light meters from companies such as Minolta that can be calibrated, the cost may run into several thousand dollars.
Examples of light meters costing a few hundred dollars include SpyderX by Datacolor (needs a PC), a handheld meter is the SM208 by Sanpometer (search SM208 meter). Note: Many light meters, including smartphone apps, will be meters used for photography and not give readings in nits (or candelas). LCD panel specifications are typically measured using nits.
PWM and Analog: Most Digital View LCD controllers support PWM and Analog as a method for adjusting the backlight brightness level (this is noted in the column headed “Other” on the controller board summary table: https://www.digitalview.com/controllers/lcd-controllers-home.html. Also see https://www.digitalview.com/blog/brightness-adjustment/ for a guide to using a dial or slider type variable resistor to adjust the backlight.
Ambient light sensor: The backlight is adjusted for brightness or powered off depending on ambient light conditions. This uses a light sensor attached to the LCD controller board, see https://www.digitalview.com/blog/light-sensor-app-note/ for more details.
The specifics of the backlight control are documented separately for each LCD controller model (product summary here) in the product manual available for download on the product page.
Note: There are two ways to adjust the perceived brightness of a LCD panel or LCD monitor, the backlight and the black-level. Very often, particularly in the past, the monitor brightness setting adjusted the black-level, this adjusts the LCD but not the backlight.
Color, color temperature etc: In addition to adjusting the brightness other settings may be adjusted as well. For example the color temperature or for example a switch to green monochrome for night vision.
Auto-dim if lights dimmed for a projector. This might be triggered by a command from a room sensor or automatically by an ambient light sensor (Autobrite+).
Night-safe lighting (update) : Dual-rail backlights can also be supported. These special backlight enable normal brightness and extreme low level brightness with custom night-safe lighting. Contact us for details.
Note: We have a blog on methods for implementing an ambient light sensor with Digital View LCD controller boards to automatically adjust the backlight or system power, see: Ambient Light Sensor
Update March 2019: Most of the above remains unchanged except for the increased availability of high bright LCD panels of around the 1,000 nit to 2,500 nit range. AUO for example has a number of large size LCD panels with 1,500 nit brightness for the digital signage market. Tianma has panels under 20″ with 1,000 nit to 1,500 nit brightness for various outdoor applications.
The other change is that high bright panels are now increasing edge-lit, this makes the panels thinner and these panels tend to use less power than the previous models. One of the benefits for monitor designers is easier heat management and reduced overall display system costs.
When display devices are brought outside, oftentimes they face the brightness of sunlight or any other form of high ambient light sources reflecting off of and overwhelming the LED backlight’s image.
With the growth of the LCD panel industry as a whole, it has become more important than ever to prevent the sun’s wash out of displays used outdoors, such as automobile displays, digital signage, and public kiosks. Hence, the sunlight readable display was invented.
One solution would be to increase the luminance of the TFT LCD monitor’s LED backlight to overpower the bright sunlight and eliminate glare. On average, TFT LCD screens have a brightness of about 250 to 450 Nits, but when this is increased to about 800 to 1000 (1000 is the most common) Nits, the device becomes a high bright LCDand a sunlight readable display.
Doing this is an affordable option for enhancement of image quality in the outdoors, including features like contrast ratio and viewing angle, in a common use setting like with phones.
Since many of today’s TFT LCD display devices have shifted to touchscreens, the touch panels on the surface of LCD screens already block a small percentage of backlighting, decreasing the surface brightness and making it so that the sunlight can even more easily wash out the display. Resistive touch panels use two transparent layers above the glass substrate, but the transparent layers can still block up to 5% of the light.
In order to optimize the high brightness of the backlight, a different type of touchscreen can be used: the capacitive touchscreen. Though it is more expensive than the resistive touch screen, this technology is more ideal for sunlight readable displays than the resistive due to its usage of a thinner film or even in-cell technologies rather than two layers above the glass of the display, and therefore, light can pass more efficiently.
However, with this method comes a list of potential problems. Firstly, high brightness displays result in much greater power consumption and shorter battery life. In order to shed more light, more power will be needed which can also consequently result in device overheating which can also shorten battery life. If the backlight’s power is increased, the LED’s half-life may also be reduced.
While in bright exterior light settings, these devices reduce eye strain as the user attempts to view the image on screen, the brightness of the display itself can also cause eye strain, seen as the brightness may overwhelm your eyes. Many devices allow the user to adjust brightness, so this concern is oftentimes not too severe.
A recent technology falling into the sunlight readable display category is the transflective TFT LCD, coming from a combination of the word transmissive and reflective. By using a transflective polarizer, a significant percentage of sunlight is reflected away from the screen to aid in the reduction of wash out. This optical layer is known as the transflector.
In transflective TFT LCDs, sunlight can reflect off the display but can also pass through the TFT cell layer and be reflected back out off a somewhat transparent rear reflector in front of the backlight, illuminating the display without as much demand and power usage from the transmissive nature of the backlight. This addresses both the issues of wash out and the disadvantages of high brightness TFT LCDs in high ambient light environments. Because of its transmissive and reflective modes, this type of device is very useful for devices that will be used outdoors but also indoors.
While it does greatly reduce power consumption, transflective LCDs are much more expensive than high brightness LCDs. In recent years, the cost has decreased, but transflective LCDs continue to be more costly.
In addition to adjustments to the internal mechanics of LCDs, it is possible to make devices more sunlight-readable using surface treatments. The most common are anti-reflective (A/R) films/coatings and anti-glare processing.
Often paired with other methods of creating sunlight readable displays is optical bonding. By gluing the glass of a display to the TFT LCD cells beneath it, optical bonding eliminates the air gap that traditional LCD displays have in them using an optical grade adhesive.
This adhesive reduces the amount of reflection between the glass and LCD cell as well as the reflection of external ambient light. Doing this helps provide a clearer image with an increased contrast ratio, or the difference in the light intensity of the brightest white pixel color and darkest black pixel color.
With this contrast ratio improvement, optical bonding addresses the root issue with unreadable outdoor displays: the contrast. Though an increase in brightness can improve contrast, by fixing the contrast itself, LCD display images in outdoor environments will not be as washed out and will require less power consumption.
The optical bonding adhesive’s elimination of the air gap also protects the LCD from moisture/fogging and dust, as there is no space for impurities to penetrate and remain under the glass layer. This especially helps with maintaining the state of LCDs in transport, storage, and humid environments.
Compiling the various methods of improving LCD screens for sunlight readability, these devices can be optimized in high ambient light settings. An anti-glare coating is applied to the surface of the glass and anti-reflective coatings are applied to both the front and back. The transflector is also used in front of the backlight. These features can result in 1000 Nit or more display lighting, without the excessive power consumption and heat production through a high brightness backlight, consequently allowing for a longer lasting and better performing LCD
Unfortunately, the process of building a reflector inside TFT LCD is complicated and transflective TFT LCD is normally several times higher cost compared with normal transmissive TFT LCD.
To further improve and enhance the qualities of the LCD, LED and cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) backlights are used. Both these create bright displays, but the LED specifically can do so without as much power consumption and heat generation as compared to the CCFL option. Optical bonding is also applied in order to improve display contrast, leading to a more efficient and better quality sunlight readable display.
Engineers are always looking for lower cost, faster, more convenient interfaces to transmit signals and to accept data and commands. The numbers of available interfaces available in the market can be dazzling. Orient Display can also convert any interfaces to the customer’s requirements among the above interfaces or to higher level interfaces.
Genetic (Raw) Interfaces: Those are the interfaces which display or touch controller manufacturers provide, including 6800,8080, SPI(,Serial Peripheral Interface), I2C, RGB (Red Green Blue), MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface), LVDS (Low-Voltage Differential Signaling), eDP ( Embedded DisplayPort) etc. Orient Display has technologies to make the above interface exchangeable.
High Level Interfaces: Orient Display has technologies to make more advanced interfaces which are more convenient to non-display engineers, such as RS232, RS485, USB, VGA, HDMI etc. They are widely accepted in the market. More information can be found on our other product pages. TFT modules, Arduino TFT display, Raspberry Pi TFT display, Control Board.
Orient Display sunlight readable TFT displays can be categorized into high brightness TFT displays,high contrast IPS displays, transflective TFT displays, Blanview TFT displays etc.
The brightness of our standard high brightness TFT displays can be from 700 to 1000 nits which make them be visible under all environments including direct sunlight. With proper adding 3M brightness enhancement film (BEF) and double brightness enhancement film (DBEF) and adjustment of the LED chips, Orient Display high brightness TFT products can achieve 1,500 to 2,000 nits or even higher luminance which makes great contrast under direct sunlight. Orient Display has a special thermal management design to reduce the heat release and largely extend LED lifetime and reduce energy consumption.
Our high contrast and wide viewing angle IPS displays can achieve contrast ratio higher than 1000:1 which can make readability under strong sunlight with lower backlight luminance. High brightness IPS displays have been widely accepted by our customers with its superb display quality and it has become one of the best sellers in all our display category.
Transflective display is an old monochrome display technology but it has been utilized in our color TFT line for sunlight readable application. Orient Display has 2.4” and 3.5” to choose from.
Blanview TFT displays are the new technology developed by Ortustech in Japan. It can provide around 40% of energy consumption for TFT panels which can use smaller rechargeable or disposable batteries and generate less heat. The price is also lower than traditional transflective TFT displays. Orient Display is partnering with the technology inventor to provide 4.3” and 5.0” .
Orient Display can also provide fullcustomized or part customized solutions for our customers to enhance the viewing experience. Orient Display can provide all the different kinds of surface treatments, such as AR (Anti-reflection); AG (Anti-glare), AF (Anti-finger print or Anti-smudge); AS (Anti-smashing); AM (Anti-microbial) etc. Orient Display can also provide both dry bonding (OCA, Optical Clear Adhesive), or wet bonding (OCR, Optical Clear Resin and OCG, Optical Clear Glue) to get rid of light reflective in air bonding products to make the products much more readable under sunlight and be more robust.
Touch panels have been a much better human machine interface which become widely popular. Orient Display has been investing heavy for capacitive touch screen sensor manufacturing capacity. Now, Orient Display factory is No.1 in the world for automotive capacitive touch screen which took around 18% market share in the world automotive market.
Based on the above three types of touch panel technology, Orient Display can also add different kinds of features like different material glove touch, water environment touch, salt water environment touch, hover touch, 3D (force) touch, haptic touch etc. Orient Display can also provide from very low cost fixed area button touch, single (one) finger touch, double finger (one finger+ one gesture) touch, 5 finger touch, 10 points touch or even 16 points touch
We are also focusing on enhancing the things administration and QC program in order that we could keep fantastic advantage within the fiercely-competitive enterprise for Tft Brightness, Lcd Tft Display Panel, Tft Lcd Display Panel, Hdmi Lcd Displays Screen,Defective Lcd Panel. Our final target is "To consider the most effective, To be the Best". Please experience cost-free to call with us if you have any prerequisites. The product will supply to all over the world, such as Europe, America, Australia,America, Thailand,Rwanda, Russia.Our products are exported worldwide. Our customers are always satisfied with our reliable quality, customer-oriented services and competitive prices. Our mission is "to continue to earn your loyalty by dedicating our efforts to the constant improvement of our products and services in order to ensure the satisfaction of our end-users, customers, employees, suppliers and the worldwide communities in which we cooperate".
Pacer offers an extensive range of colour TFT LCD panels from 1.8″ through the popular 3.5″ and 5.7″ sizes to 82″. Our range includes sunlight readable panels from 5.6″ to 70″, bar cut panels, and SMART TFT displays with built-in control. We offer TFT displays with high brightness, high contrast ratio, wide viewing angle, wide temperature operation, longer lamp life, and lower power consumption.
TFT displays are used extensively in many industrial, commercial and scientific applications, including ATMs, POS terminals, kiosks, security systems, lottery and gambling gaming machines, medical equipment, factory automation, digital advertisement signage, transportation information, and marine equipment.
TFT technology is being used to replace Mono LCD in many applications, and Raystar Optronics now offers a 5.2″ TFT module designed specifically to fit the footprint of the industry standard RG24064-series 240×64 mono graphic STN LCD. The RFS520A can replace traditional STN displays of 8×2 or 16×2 format as it shares the same 16 pin footprint.
Our TFT modules are fully supported with a variety of options including wide operating temperatures, high brightness and contrast, built-in DC-DC and temperature compensation circuitry and most with white LED backlights. Resistive Touchscreens and Projected Capacitive Touchscreens are available for most models. Many panels can be configured as a kit – see our Interface Kits page for more details.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT – Mitsubishi has decided to end production of TFT-LCD modules, as the company is no longer able to maintain the products’ competitiveness after significant price falls in the global market. Production of TFT-LCD modules is scheduled to end in June 2022 with a Last Time Buy date of June 2021. Please contact us as soon as possible to discuss last time buy or identification of suitable alternative displays.
Raystar is a professional TFT (Thin Film Transistor) module manufacturer. Whether you need a TFT display with control board, high brightness, wide viewing angle, monochrome or bar type, we have TFT active matrix display models for you to choose from.
Mitsubishi’s Electric Diode InfraRed sensor (MelDIR) is a thermal sensor for applications in the fields of security, surveillance, crime prevention, people counting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and smart buildings.
LITEMAX® Industrial Display solution provide a wide range of reliable displays from 5.7″ to 85″ including LCD panel modules, open frame LCD displays, outdoor displays, and panel mount monitors. LITEMAX have developed and focused on LCD display technologies such as high brightness technology, optical bonding solutions, and color enhancement technology that bring more add-on value to enhance their products.
If customers would need sunlight readable displays solution for the applications, Winstar High Brightness TFT Display solution is as a good solution. Winstar high brightness TFT LCD panel is featured with brightness up from 800 nits to 1100 nits. Please note the brightness will be lower if the module require touch panel or O-Film on it.
These models are also available in resistive touch panel and capacitive touch panel, but the brightness would be affected after adding the touch panel. Winstar Sunlight Readable LCD Modules (High Brightness TFT Display) are suitable for outdoor applications. Winstar available high backlighting sunlight viewable TFT display sizes including 3.5", 4", 4.3", 5.7", 7", 10.1" and 12.3 inch.
For many years, TFT displays have been the dominating technology in visualization. TFT LCDs are all around in our daily lives — in consumer and automotive applications, in our business environments, in healthcare, and within communication devices, home appliances, and factory automation products. While there are many LCD products available today, they’re not all suitable for every application. This is especially the case for industrial LCD monitors. To determine the best LCD display for your application, it’s important to understand your target market and its unique design issues.
The vast majority of LCD displays are designed for consumer devices such as smartphones, cameras, tablet computers, and gaming devices. But they have very different requirements than those for industrial applications. Due to very competitive pricing and quick production cycles, consumer display modules don’t always incorporate the durability, reliability, and advanced features required to survive in an industrial environment. Product life cycles are also typically much shorter in consumer applications. Screens manufactured for these applications are generally only available for one, in best case two years.
In contrast, display modules for industrial applications require Long product life cycles— often up to ten years or more. Plus, when an industrial module is discontinued by the manufacturer, a successor product should be backward-compatible so as to fit into the existing enclosure without requiring a redesign of the entire system.
The ability to withstand temperature variations as well as shock and vibration is also a key consideration when selecting displays for today’s industrial applications. They must be resilient enough to withstand frequent bumps or jiggles by machine operators and surrounding equipment, and also must be able to handle various operating temperatures.
Industrial displays are typically housed in an enclosure as part of a larger piece of equipment. In these situations, the heat generated by the surrounding equipment gets trapped within the enclosure, which can be detrimental to many displays. Therefore, it’s important to keep the real storage and operating temperature requirements in mind when choosing a display. While measures can be taken to dissipate the generated heat — such as using fans within the enclosure — the most efficient way to ensure compliance with the storage and operating temperature requirements is to select a display that is optimized for these types of environments. Fortunately, improvements in liquid-crystal materials have made it possible to extend the operating temperature ranges of LCDs from –30 to 80°C presently.
In general, industrial devices should be more rugged compared to standard devices. Minimizing the number of pin and socket connectors and introducing chip-on-glass semiconductors is one way to achieve higher shock and vibration resistance. Also, installing metal bezels instead of plastic cabinets helps to improve the unit’s EMI characteristics and mechanical resistance. Adding chemically strengthened front glass helps to avoid scratches and blemishes on the user surface.
It’s important that displays used in industrial applications support clear and precise viewing from multiple angles under a variety of ambient light conditions. The brighter the environment, the more difficult it can be to read a standard transmissive LCD display with a typical brightness of 250 to 300 cd/m2. NVD has developed displays that can perform in the 800-cd/m2-and-higher range by implementing high-efficiency LEDs for the backlight unit– if necessary, in combination with special brightness enhancement films.
Increasing the display’s contrast ratio is another effective way that display manufacturers can improve display readability in bright environments. Typical contrast ratios for non-industrial displays are in the range of 200:1 to 300:1, which may not be sufficient when a machine operator is viewing the display from a distance. Displays with contrast ratios around 500:1 or greater are better suited for industrial environments. Another benefit of this method is that it doesn’t increase power consumption.
Transflective LCDs are a good solution for environments with variable lighting. Having both transmissive and reflective characteristics, transflective LCDs have the option of using a backlight in dim lighting (transmissive mode), as well as using reflective properties in bright lighting (reflective mode). This reduces power consumption and heat production in reflective mode since the backlight isn’t used.
Multi-angle readability is another key selection factor. In a typical industrial environment, a machine operator is more likely to be positioned at an off-angle rather than right in front of the screen. Implementing a display designed for consumer applications typically doesn’t work well in this situation, as there is image distortion and color shifting when viewed at an angle. But, a number of technologies have been employed to improve off-angle viewing in displays, making them suitable for industrial applications. Some film-based technologies yield viewing angles of 160º horizontally and 140º vertically, but in some cases, this is still not sufficient. In-plane switching technology (IPS), multi-domain vertical alignment (MVA), and fringe field switching (FFS)offer alternatives. These proprietary technologies are able to achieve viewing angles of almost 90-degrees into all four directions without any color shift.
Size and resolution also play a role in overall readability. Displays between 2 and 15-inch diagonal sizes are used most often in industrial applications. These sizes provide sufficient area to view figures, waveforms, and other graphical data without taking up too much real estate on a piece of equipment.
From an aspect ratio 4:3 initially, industrial displays are now shifting to wide formats with WVGA to WXGA resolutions. The wide-aspect format enables users to view longer waveforms and more data on a single display. These display modules can also be designed to incorporate touch-key functions, allowing equipment manufacturers to skip physical switches and buttons and design HMIs based more on software than hardware.
New Vision Display’s experts are prepared to assist in defining appropriate solutions for all applications and in helping find the right balance between manufacturing cost and performance.
Ready to get started or learn more about how we can help your business? Call us at +1-855-848-1332 or fill out the form below and a company representative will be in touch within 1 business day.
Important technical improvements of LCD, such as LED backlighting and wide viewing Angle, are directly related to LCD. And account for an LCD display 80% of the cost of the LCD panel, enough to show that the LCD panel is the core part of the entire display, the quality of the LCD panel, can be said to directly determine the quality of an LCD display.
The production of civil LCD displays is just an assembly process. The LCD panel, the main control circuit, shell, and other parts of the main assembly, basically will not have too complex technical problems.
Does this mean that LCDS are low-tech products? In fact, it is not. The production and manufacturing process of the LCD panels is very complicated, requiring at least 300 process processes. The whole process needs to be carried out in a dust-free environment and with precise technology.
The general structure of the LCD panel is not very complex, now the structure of the LCD panel is divided into two parts: the LCD panel and the backlight system.
Due to the LCD does not shine, so you need to use another light source to illuminate, the function of the backlight system is to this, but currently used CCFL lamp or LED backlight, don’t have the characteristics of the surface light source, so you need to guide plate, spreadsheet components, such as linear or point sources of light evenly across the surface, in order to make the entire LCD panel on the differences of luminous intensity is the same, but it is very difficult, to achieve the ideal state can be to try to reduce brightness non-uniformity, the backlight system has a lot to the test of design and workmanship.
In addition, there is a driving IC and printed circuit board beside the LCD panel, which is mainly used to control the rotation of LCD molecules in the LCD panel and the transmission of display signals. The LCD plate is thin and translucent without electricity. It is roughly shaped like a sandwich, with an LCD sandwiched between a layer of TFT glass and a layer of colored filters.
LCD with light refraction properties of solid crystals, with fluid flow characteristics at the same time, under the drive of the electrode, can be arranged in a way that, in accordance with the master want to control the strength of the light through, and then on the color filter, through the red, green, blue three colors of each pixel toning, eventually get the full-screen image.
According to the functional division, the LCD panel can be divided into the LCD panel and the backlight system. However, to produce an LCD panel, it needs to go through three complicated processes, namely, the manufacturing process of the front segment Array,the manufacturing process of the middle segment Cell, and the assembly of the rear segment module. Today we will be here, for you in detail to introduce the production of the LCD panel manufacturing process.
The manufacturing process of the LCD panel Array is mainly composed of four parts: film, yellow light, etch and peel film. If we just look at it in this way, many netizens do not understand the specific meaning of these four steps and why they do so.
First of all, the motion and arrangement of LCD molecules need electrons to drive them. Therefore, on the TFT glass, the carrier of LCD, there must be conductive parts to control the motion of LCD. In this case, we use ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) to do this.ITO is transparent and also acts as a thin-film conductive crystal so that it doesn’t block the backlight.
The different arrangement of LCD molecules and the rapid motion change can ensure that each pixel displays the corresponding color accurately and the image changes accurately and quickly, which requires the precision of LCD molecule control.ITO film needs special treatment, just like printing the circuit on the PCB board, drawing the conductive circuit on the whole LCD board.
First, the ITO film layer needs to be deposited on the TFT glass, so that there is a smooth and uniform ITO film on the whole TFT glass. Then, using ionized water, the ITO glass is cleaned and ready for the next step.
Next, a photoresist is applied to the glass on which ITO film is deposited, and a uniform photoresist layer is formed on the ITO glass. After baking for a period of time, the solvent of the photoresist was partially volatilized to increase the adhesion of the photoresist material to the ITO glass.
Stripping: High concentration of alkali solution (NaOH solution) is used as a stripping solution to peel off the remaining photoresist on the glass so that ITO glass can form ITO graphics exactly consistent with the photolithography mask.
Rinse the basic label of glass with an organic solution and remove the photolithographic tape after reaction to keep the glass clean. This completes the first thin-film conductive crystal process, which generally requires at least five identical processes to form a complex and sophisticated pattern of electrodes on the glass.
This completes the previous Array process. It is not difficult to see from the whole process that ITO film is deposited, photoresist coated, exposed, developed, and etched on TFT glass, and finally, ITO electrode pattern designed in the early stage is formed on TFT glass to control the movement of LCD molecules on the glass. The general steps of the whole production process are not complicated, but the technical details and precautions are very complicated, so we will not introduce them here. Interested friends can consult relevant materials by themselves.
The glass that the LCD board uses makes a craft also very exquisite. (The manufacturing process flow of the LCD display screen)At present, the world’s largest LCD panel glass, mainly by the United States Corning, Japan Asahi glass manufacturers, located in the upstream of the production of LCD panel, these manufacturers have mastered the glass production technology patents. A few months ago, the earthquake caused a corning glass furnace shutdown incident, which has caused a certain impact on the LCD panel industry, you can see its position in the industry.
As mentioned earlier, the LCD panel is structured like a sandwich, with an LCD sandwiched between the lower TFT glass and the upper color filter. The terminal Cell process in LCD panel manufacturing involves the TFT glass being glued to the top and bottom of a colored filter, but this is not a simple bonding process that requires a lot of technical detail.
As you can see from the figure above, the glass is divided into 6 pieces of the same size. In other words, the LCD made from this glass is finally cut into 6 pieces, and the size of each piece is the final size. When the glass is cast, the specifications and sizes of each glass have been designed in advance.
Then, the organic polymer directional material is coated on the surface of the glass, that is, a uniform directional layer is applied to the appropriate position of ITO glass by the method of selective coating. Meanwhile, the directional layer is cured.
Directional friction:Flannelette material is used to rub the surface of the layer in a specific direction so that the LCD molecules can be arranged along the friction direction of the aligned layer in the future to ensure the consistency of the arrangement of LCD molecules. After the alignment friction, there will be some contaminants such as flannelette thread, which need to be washed away through a special cleaning process.
After the TFT glass substrate is cleaned, a sealant coating is applied to allow the TFT glass substrate to be bonded to the color filter and to prevent LCD outflow.
Finally, the conductive adhesive is applied to the frame in the bonding direction of the glass of the color filter to ensure that external electrons can flow into the LCD layer. Then, according to the bonding mark on the TFT glass substrate and the color filter, two pieces of glass are bonded together, and the bonding material is solidified at high temperatures to make the upper and lower glasses fit statically.
Color filters are very important components of LCD panels. Manufacturers of color filters, like glass substrate manufacturers, are upstream of LCD panel manufacturers. Their oversupply or undersupply can directly affect the production schedule of LCD panels and indirectly affect the end market.
As can be seen from the above figure, each LCD panel is left with two edges after cutting. What is it used for? You can find the answer in the later module process
Finally, a polarizer is placed on both sides of each LCD substrate, with the horizontal polarizer facing outwards and the vertical polarizer facing inwards.
When making LCD panel, must up and down each use one, and presents the alternating direction, when has the electric field and does not have the electric field, causes the light to produce the phase difference and to present the light and dark state, uses in the display subtitle or the pattern.
The rear Module manufacturing process is mainly the integration of the drive IC pressing of the LCD substrate and the printed circuit board. This part can transmit the display signal received from the main control circuit to the drive IC to drive the LCD molecules to rotate and display the image. In addition, the backlight part will be integrated with the LCD substrate at this stage, and the complete LCD panel is completed.
Firstly, the heteroconductive adhesive is pressed on the two edges, which allows external electrons to enter the LCD substrate layer and acts as a bridge for electronic transmission
Next is the drive IC press. The main function of the drive IC is to output the required voltage to each pixel and control the degree of torsion of the LCD molecules. The drive IC is divided into two types. The source drive IC located in the X-axis is responsible for the input of data. It is characterized by high frequency and has an image function. The gate drive IC located in the Y-axis is responsible for the degree and speed of torsion of LCD molecules, which directly affects the response time of the LCD display. However, there are already many LCD panels that only have driving IC in the X-axis direction, perhaps because the Y-axis drive IC function has been integrated and simplified.
The press of the flexible circuit board can transmit data signals and act as the bridge between the external printed circuit and LCD. It can be bent and thus becomes a flexible or flexible circuit board
The manufacturing process of the LCD substrate still has a lot of details and matters needing attention, for example, rinse with clean, dry, dry, dry, ultrasonic cleaning, exposure, development and so on and so on, all have very strict technical details and requirements, so as to produce qualified eyes panel, interested friends can consult relevant technical information by a search engine.
LCD (LC) is a kind of LCD, which has the properties of light transmission and refraction of solid Crystal, as well as the flow property of Liquid. It is because of this property that it will be applied to the display field.
However, LCD does not emit light autonomously, so the display equipment using LCD as the display medium needs to be equipped with another backlight system.
First, a backplate is needed as the carrier of the light source. The common light source for LCD display equipment is CCFL cold cathode backlight, but it has started to switch to an LED backlight, but either one needs a backplate as the carrier.
CCFL backlight has been with LCD for a long time. Compared with LED backlight, CCFL backlight has many defects. However, it has gradually evolved to save 50% of the lamp and enhance the transmittance of the LCD panel, so as to achieve the purpose of energy-saving.
With the rapid development of LED in the field of lighting, the cost has been greatly reduced.LCD panels have also started to use LED as the backlight on a large scale. Currently, in order to control costs, an LED backlight is placed on the side rather than on the backplate, which can reduce the number of LED grains.
However, no matter CCFL backlight or LED backlight is placed in various ways, the nature of the backlight source cannot be a surface light source, but a linear light source or point light source. Therefore, other components are needed to evenly distribute the light to the whole surface. This task is accomplished by the diffuser plate and diffuser plate.
On the transparent diffuser plate, point-like printing can block part of the light. The LED backlight on the side drives the light from the side of the diffuser plate, and the light reflects and refracts back and forth in the diffuser plate, distributing the light evenly to the whole surface. Point-like printing blocks part of the light, screening the light evenly like a sieve.
At the top of the diffusion plate, there will be 3~4 diffuser pieces, constantly uniform light to the whole surface, improve the uniformity of light, which is directly related to the LCD panel display effect. Professional LCD in order to better control the brightness uniformity of the screen, panel procurement, the later backlight control circuit, will make great efforts to ensure the quality of the panel.
The backlight system also includes a backlight module laminator, located behind the backplane. In the CCFL backlight era, you can often see the long strip laminator like the one above, with each coil responsible for a set of tubes.
Since the LCD substrate and the backlight system are not fixed by bonding, a metal or rubber frame is needed to be added to the outer layer to fix the LCD substrate and the backlight system.
After the period of the Module, the process is completed in LCM (LCDModule) factory, the core of this part of the basic does not involve the use of LCD manufacturing technology, mainly is some assembly work, so some machine panel factories such as chi mei, Korea department such as Samsung panel factory, all set with LCM factories in mainland China, Duan Mo group after the LCD panel assembly, so that we can convenient mainland area each big monitor procurement contract with LCD TV manufacturers, can reduce the human in the whole manufacturing and transportation costs.
However, neither Taiwan nor Korea has any intention to set up factories in mainland China for the LCD panel front and middle manufacturing process involving core technologies. Therefore, there is still a long way to go for China to have its own LCD panel industry.
Important technical improvements of LCD, such as LED backlighting and wide viewing Angle, are directly related to LCD. And account for an LCD display 80% of the cost of the LCD panel, enough to show that the LCD panel is the core part of the entire display, the quality of the LCD panel, can be said to directly determine the quality of an LCD display.
The production of civil LCD displays is just an assembly process. The LCD panel, the main control circuit, shell, and other parts of the main assembly, basically will not have too complex technical problems.
Does this mean that LCDS are low-tech products? In fact, it is not. The production and manufacturing process of the LCD panels is very complicated, requiring at least 300 process processes. The whole process needs to be carried out in a dust-free environment and with precise technology.
The general structure of the LCD panel is not very complex, now the structure of the LCD panel is divided into two parts: the LCD panel and the backlight system.
Due to the LCD does not shine, so you need to use another light source to illuminate, the function of the backlight system is to this, but currently used CCFL lamp or LED backlight, don’t have the characteristics of the surface light source, so you need to guide plate, spreadsheet components, such as linear or point sources of light evenly across the surface, in order to make the entire LCD panel on the differences of luminous intensity is the same, but it is very difficult, to achieve the ideal state can be to try to reduce brightness non-uniformity, the backlight system has a lot to the test of design and workmanship.
In addition, there is a driving IC and printed circuit board beside the LCD panel, which is mainly used to control the rotation of LCD molecules in the LCD panel and the transmission of display signals. The LCD plate is thin and translucent without electricity. It is roughly shaped like a sandwich, with an LCD sandwiched between a layer of TFT glass and a layer of colored filters.
LCD with light refraction properties of solid crystals, with fluid flow characteristics at the same time, under the drive of the electrode, can be arranged in a way that, in accordance with the master want to control the strength of the light through, and then on the color filter, through the red, green, blue three colors of each pixel toning, eventually get the full-screen image.
According to the functional division, the LCD panel can be divided into the LCD panel and the backlight system. However, to produce an LCD panel, it needs to go through three complicated processes, namely, the manufacturing process of the front segment Array,the manufacturing process of the middle segment Cell, and the assembly of the rear segment module. Today we will be here, for you in detail to introduce the production of the LCD panel manufacturing process.
The manufacturing process of the LCD panel Array is mainly composed of four parts: film, yellow light, etch and peel film. If we just look at it in this way, many netizens do not understand the specific meaning of these four steps and why they do so.
First of all, the motion and arrangement of LCD molecules need electrons to drive them. Therefore, on the TFT glass, the carrier of LCD, there must be conductive parts to control the motion of LCD. In this case, we use ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) to do this.ITO is transparent and also acts as a thin-film conductive crystal so that it doesn’t block the backlight.
The different arrangement of LCD molecules and the rapid motion change can ensure that each pixel displays the corresponding color accurately and the image changes accurately and quickly, which requires the precision of LCD molecule control.ITO film needs special treatment, just like printing the circuit on the PCB board, drawing the conductive circuit on the whole LCD board.
First, the ITO film layer needs to be deposited on the TFT glass, so that there is a smooth and uniform ITO film on the whole TFT glass. Then, using ionized water, the ITO glass is cleaned and ready for the next step.
Next, a photoresist is applied to the glass on which ITO film is deposited, and a uniform photoresist layer is formed on the ITO glass. After baking for a period of time, the solvent of the photoresist was partially volatilized to increase the adhesion of the photoresist material to the ITO glass.
Stripping: High concentration of alkali solution (NaOH solution) is used as a stripping solution to peel off the remaining photoresist on the glass so that ITO glass can form ITO graphics exactly consistent with the photolithography mask.
Rinse the basic label of glass with an organic solution and remove the photolithographic tape after reaction to keep the glass clean. This completes the first thin-film conductive crystal process, which generally requires at least five identical processes to form a complex and sophisticated pattern of electrodes on the glass.
This completes the previous Array process. It is not difficult to see from the whole process that ITO film is deposited, photoresist coated, exposed, developed, and etched on TFT glass, and finally, ITO electrode pattern designed in the early stage is formed on TFT glass to control the movement of LCD molecules on the glass. The general steps of the whole production process are not complicated, but the technical details and precautions are very complicated, so we will not introduce them here. Interested friends can consult relevant materials by themselves.
The glass that the LCD board uses makes a craft also very exquisite. (The manufacturing process flow of the LCD display screen)At present, the world’s largest LCD panel glass, mainly by the United States Corning, Japan Asahi glass manufacturers, located in the upstream of the production of LCD panel, these manufacturers have mastered the glass production technology patents. A few months ago, the earthquake caused a corning glass furnace shutdown incident, which has caused a certain impact on the LCD panel industry, you can see its position in the industry.
As mentioned earlier, the LCD panel is structured like a sandwich, with an LCD sandwiched between the lower TFT glass and the upper color filter. The terminal Cell process in LCD panel manufacturing involves the TFT glass being glued to the top and bottom of a colored filter, but this is not a simple bonding process that requires a lot of technical detail.
As you can see from the figure above, the glass is divided into 6 pieces of the same size. In other words, the LCD made from this glass is finally cut into 6 pieces, and the size of each piece is the final size. When the glass is cast, the specifications and sizes of each glass have been designed in advance.
Then, the organic polymer directional material is coated on the surface of the glass, that is, a uniform directional layer is applied to the appropriate position of ITO glass by the method of selective coating. Meanwhile, the directional layer is cured.
Directional friction:Flannelette material is used to rub the surface of the layer in a specific direction so that the LCD molecules can be arranged along the friction direction of the aligned layer in the future to ensure the consistency of the arrangement of LCD molecules. After the alignment friction, there will be some contaminants such as flannelette thread, which need to be washed away through a special cleaning process.
After the TFT glass substrate is cleaned, a sealant coating is applied to allow the TFT glass substrate to be bonded to the color filter and to prevent LCD outflow.
Finally, the conductive adhesive is applied to the frame in the bonding direction of the glass of the color filter to ensure that external electrons can flow into the LCD layer. Then, according to the bonding mark on the TFT glass substrate and the color filter, two pieces of glass are bonded together, and the bonding material is solidified at high temperatures to make the upper and lower glasses fit statically.
Color filters are very important components of LCD panels. Manufacturers of color filters, like glass substrate manufacturers, are upstream of LCD panel manufacturers. Their oversupply or undersupply can directly affect the production schedule of LCD panels and indirectly affect the end market.
As can be seen from the above figure, each LCD panel is left with two edges after cutting. What is it used for? You can find the answer in the later module process
Finally, a polarizer is placed on both sides of each LCD substrate, with the horizontal polarizer facing outwards and the vertical polarizer facing inwards.
When making LCD panel, must up and down each use one, and presents the alternating direction, when has the electric field and does not have the electric field, causes the light to produce the phase difference and to present the light and dark state, uses in the display subtitle or the pattern.
The rear Module manufacturing process is mainly the integration of the drive IC pressing of the LCD substrate and the printed circuit board. This part can transmit the display signal received from the main control circuit to the drive IC to drive the LCD molecules to rotate and display the image. In addition, the backlight part will be integrated with the LCD substrate at this stage, and the complete LCD panel is completed.
Firstly, the heteroconductive adhesive is pressed on the two edges, which allows external electrons to enter the LCD substrate layer and acts as a bridge for electronic transmission
Next is the drive IC press. The main function of the drive IC is to output the required voltage to each pixel and control the degree of torsion of the LCD molecules. The drive IC is divided into two types. The source drive IC located in the X-axis is responsible for the input of data. It is characterized by high frequency and has an image function. The gate drive IC located in the Y-axis is responsible for the degree and speed of torsion of LCD molecules, which directly affects the response time of the LCD display. However, there are already many LCD panels that only have driving IC in the X-axis direction, perhaps because the Y-axis drive IC function has been integrated and simplified.
The press of the flexible circuit board can transmit data signals and act as the bridge between the external printed circuit and LCD. It can be bent and thus becomes a flexible or flexible circuit board
The manufacturing process of the LCD substrate still has a lot of details and matters needing attention, for example, rinse with clean, dry, dry, dry, ultrasonic cleaning, exposure, development and so on and so on, all have very strict technical details and requirements, so as to produce qualified eyes panel, interested friends can consult relevant technical information by a search engine.
LCD (LC) is a kind of LCD, which has the properties of light transmission and refraction of solid Crystal, as well as the flow property of Liquid. It is because of this property that it will be applied to the display field.
However, LCD does not emit light autonomously, so the display equipment using LCD as the display medium needs to be equipped with another backlight system.
First, a backplate is needed as the carrier of the light source. The common light source for LCD display equipment is CCFL cold cathode backlight, but it has started to switch to an LED backlight, but either one needs a backplate as the carrier.
CCFL backlight has been with LCD for a long time. Compared with LED backlight, CCFL backlight has many defects. However, it has gradually evolved to save 50% of the lamp and enhance the transmittance of the LCD panel, so as to achieve the purpose of energy-saving.
With the rapid development of LED in the field of lighting, the cost has been greatly reduced.LCD panels have also started to use LED as the backlight on a large scale. Currently, in order to control costs, an LED backlight is placed on the side rather than on the backplate, which can reduce the number of LED grains.
However, no matter CCFL backlight or LED backlight is placed in various ways, the nature of the backlight source cannot be a surface light source, but a linear light source or point light source. Therefore, other components are needed to evenly distribute the light to the whole surface. This task is accomplished by the diffuser plate and diffuser plate.
On the transparent diffuser plate, point-like printing can block part of the light. The LED backlight on the side drives the light from the side of the diffuser plate, and the light reflects and refracts back and forth in the diffuser plate, distributing the light evenly to the whole surface. Point-like printing blocks part of the light, screening the light evenly like a sieve.
At the top of the diffusion plate, there will be 3~4 diffuser pieces, constantly uniform light to the whole surface, improve the uniformity of light, which is directly related to the LCD panel display effect. Professional LCD in order to better control the brightness uniformity of the screen, panel procurement, the later backlight control circuit, will make great efforts to ensure the quality of the panel.
The backlight system also includes a backlight module laminator, located behind the backplane. In the CCFL backlight era, you can often see the long strip laminator like the one above, with each coil responsible for a set of tubes.
Since the LCD substrate and the backlight system are not fixed by bonding, a metal or rubber frame is needed to be added to the outer layer to fix the LCD substrate and the backlight system.
After the period of the Module, the process is completed in LCM (LCDModule) factory, the core of this part of the basic does not involve the use of LCD manufacturing technology, mainly is some assembly work, so some machine panel factories such as chi mei, Korea department such as Samsung panel factory, all set with LCM factories in mainland China, Duan Mo group after the LCD panel assembly, so that we can convenient mainland area each big monitor procurement contract with LCD TV manufacturers, can reduce the human in the whole manufacturing and transportation costs.
However, neither Taiwan nor Korea has any intention to set up factories in mainland China for the LCD panel front and middle manufacturing process involving core technologies. Therefore, there is still a long way to go for China to have its own LCD panel industry.
Let us start with the basics first; refresh the knowledge about TN and LCD displays in general, later we will talk about TFTs (Thin Film Transistors), how they differ from regular monochrome LCD displays. Then we will go on to the ghosting effect, so we will not only discuss the technology behind the construction of the TFT, but also some phenomena, like the ghosting effect, or grayscale inversion, that are important to understand when using an LCD TFT display.
Next, we will look at different technologies of the TFT LCD displays like TN, IPS, VA, and of course about transmissive and transflective LCD displays, because TFT displays also can be transmissive and transflective. In the last part we will talk about backlight.
Let us start with a short review of the most basic liquid crystal cell, which is the TN (twisted nematic) display. On the picture above, we can see that the light can be transmit through the cell or blocked by the liquid crystal cell using voltage. If you want to learn more about monochrome LCD displays and the basics of LCD displays, follow this link.
What is a TFT LCD display and how it is different from a monochrome LCD display? TFT is called an active display. Active, means we have one or more transistors in every cell, in every pixel and in every subpixel. TFT stands for Thin Film Transistor, transistors that are very small and very thin and are built into the pixel, so they are not somewhere outside in a controller, but they are in the pixel itself. For example, in a 55-inch TV set, the TFT display contains millions of transistors in the pixels. We do not see them, because they are very small and hidden, if we zoom in, however, we can see them in every corner of each pixel, like on the picture below.
On the picture above we can see subpixels, that are basic RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colors and a black part, with the transistors and electronic circuits. We just need to know that we have pixels, and subpixels, and each subpixel has transistors. This makes the display active, and thus is called the TFT display. TFT displays are usually color displays, but there are also monochrome TFT displays, that are active, and have transistors, but have no colors. The colors in the TFT LCD display are typically added by color filters on each subpixel. Usually the filters are RGB, but we also have RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) LCD displays with added subpixels without the filter (White) to make the display brighter.
Going a little bit deeper, into the TFT cell, there is a part inside well known to us from the monochrome LCD display Riverdi University lecture. We have a cell, liquid crystal, polarizers, an ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) layer for the electrodes, and additionally an electronic circuit. Usually, the electronic circuit consists of one transistor and some capacitors to sustain the pixel state when we switch the pixel OFF and ON. In a TFT LCD display the pixels are much more complicated because apart from building the liquid crystal part, we also need to build an electronic part.
That is why TFT LCD display technologies are very expensive to manufacture. If you are familiar with electronics, you know that the transistor is a kind of switch, and it allows us to switch the pixel ON and OFF. Because it is built into the pixel itself, it can be done very quickly and be very well controlled. We can control the exact state of every pixel not only the ON and OFF states, but also all the states in between. We can switch the light of the cells ON and OFF in several steps. Usually for TFT LCD displays it will be 8-bit steps per color, so we have 256 steps of brightness for every color, and every subpixel. Because we have three subpixels, we have a 24-bit color range, that means over 16 million combinations, we can, at least theoretically, show on our TFT LCD display over 16 million distinct colors using RGB pixels.
Now that we know how the TFT LCD display works, we can now learn some practical things one of which is LCD TFT ghosting. We know how the image is created, but what happens when we have the image on the screen for a prolonged time, and how to prevent it. In LCD displays we have something called LCD ghosting. We do not see it very often, but in some displays this phenomenon still exists.
If some elements of the picture i.e., your company logo is in the same place of the screen for a long period of time, for couple of weeks, months or a year, the crystals will memorize the state and later, when we change the image, we may see some