In the new era of display, Mini LED with its features of high brightness, high contrast, fast refresh rate and wide color gamut, opens up a new direction for the display industry.

Chu noted that for applications using displays smaller than 20 inches such as mobile phone and VR, RGB OLED still dominate. OLED has low cost advantage for these applications. Therefore, Chu said Mini LED backlight is only adopted for conceptual products in the domain currently. Mini LED backlight is majorly adopted in automotive displays and TV panels with AUO, Nationstar and BOE using Mini LED in their products.

Dimming Zone is another Mini LED feature for breaking into the market. Existing Mini LED backlight solutions in the market provide around 1000 dimming zones while some companies are working on increasing dimming zones for better display performance.

Despite that Mini LED products are entering the market; their manufacture cost is still a big issue. Take a 65-inch TV for instance, the cost of Mini LED backlight module would take up to half of the display cost including LED accounting for 15-20% and transferring process for another 15-20%. Moreover, unlike conventional backplane, Mini LED backlight backplane is a whole piece of 60-inch board, leading to high cost of PCB, taking up 50-60%. And IC takes 15% of the total cost. Thus, there are still rooms for these technology to improve, resulting in new opportunities for novel materials and equipment.