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Is Foxconn Trying to Access Sharp's new Brilliant Backlight Technology for Future iDevice Displays?

10A News - Rumor
In 2012 the Nikkei Business Daily reported that Japan's Sharp Corp would supply technological know-how to Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co for a plant in China that would produce panels for Apple Inc's iPhone and other consumer electronics products. Flashing forward to today we see that a new rumor has reportedly surfaced at Taiwan's United Daily News which states that Foxconn is currently in negotiations to enter an agreement with Sharp to use their technological advantages that would help secure iPhone and iPad display orders. Whether that rumor will ever pan out in the future is unknown at this time, but what we do know is that Sharp has a new technology that will dramatically improve the brightness of LCD's that could match or better OLED technology. This could be of interest to Apple and Foxconn who would manufacture it in the future and so this report takes a quick look at this promising new technology.

 

2Af SHARP LCD BACKLIGHT FOR SMARTPHONE, TABLETS AND WEARABLE DEVICES

A Nikkei business publication is reporting that Sharp Corp has announced that it has developed a high-brightness, small-size LED for the backlight of small and middle-size LCD panels with a wide color gamut.

 

The company will start to ship samples of the LED on Aug 6, 2014, and mass-produce it in September 2014. The price of the sample is approximately US$0.39, including tax.

 

Sharp's new LED realizes a total luminous flux (brightness) of 8.3lm with a 90% color gamut on NTSC standards. The brightness is more than 12% higher than any previous product. The high brightness was realized by improving the luminous efficiency of the blue LED chip, redesigning the package and changing the combination ratios of the red and green fluorescent materials, etc.

 

More importantly however is the fact that by making improvements to the packaging technology, Sharp was able to realize a size that is about 30% smaller than that of their previous products. The width of the LED package was reduced from 3.8 to 3mm. The power consumption did not change. As a result, it becomes possible to increase the number of LEDs used in an LCD panel, improving the brightness of small and middle-size LCD panels used for smartphones, tablets and notebook computers.

 

The technology that allowed Sharp to attain the higher brightness for their backlights was actually developed by General Electric and licensed to Sharp.

 

3AF2A - NEW BACKLIGHT COMPONENT

Researchers at GE Lighting in Europe found and patented a breakthrough way to produce a better red light.

 

A large part of how we see colors boils down to the spectrum of light emitted by the source. (Although light appears white, we can see its colored components corresponding to the particular wavelengths during a rainbow).

 

Of these colors, the red has been the most elusive to produce. Deep red makes other colors like green and yellow more vivid. But to the human eye it appears dim since it moves quickly to the invisible, infrared part of the spectrum. GE's Inventor stated that "For a long time, we had to choose between brightness and appearance." The result was a compromise that yielded displays and screens with a broad red profile with enough brightness, but also washed out yellows, greens and oranges.

 

GE's research team found clues of how to achieve their breakthrough in a material called potassium fluorosilicate (PFS). The team noted that "This material looks like pure yellowish powder that does not do much, but when you dope it with manganese, it emits a beautiful narrow red line. We were able to coax that manganese to do the heavy lifting for us."

 

The end result is that the new LED technology could vastly improve the color and crispness of LED and LCD displays for everything from smartphones and tablets to TV sets. The team added that "We were able to make LEDs emit the color red in a narrow band that makes everything look sharper and cleaner than the current state-of-art technology. It really makes the pictures pop."

 

GE acknowledged that it has already licensed the technology to Japan's Sharp Corp. Without divulging any brands, GE noted that new smartphones, tablets and TV's are already in production using this new technology.

 

For now the questions are many and the answers are few. Will Apple adopt this technology from GE or Sharp for future iDevices and MacBooks? And will Foxconn win the contract to manufacture these iDevices with this new breakthrough backlight technology? Only time will tell.

 

This past week Patently Apple covered a new patent application from Apple wherein their engineers acknowledged that "active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) displays have become more mainstream due to their better contrast ratios when compared to conventional liquid crystal displays (LCDs)."

 

The new technology from GE which has been licensed by Sharp may very well hold a solution to providing a better contrast ratio to displays that Apple is seeking.

 

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