US researcher Displaysearch has gone through looking at the new trend to put LED backlights into TV sets and reckons that the cost of doing it in a 40 inch TV set is already down to around $118 for each set and the cost will hit $100 in the last quarter of this year. After that, it will head down towards $50 and remain only a tiny bit more expensive than existing cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) technology, which is dominant today, by 2013.
As a result most LCD panel and set makers will opt for LED backlight units to improve visual performance, create thinner TV sets, and reduce power consumption.
Cost reduction is being driven by increasing production volumes, due to the higher demand, but also by improvement in LED luminous intensity, which means less LED chips are used.
DisplaySearch said ‘Analyzing developments throughout the supply chain, we have built an LED and CCFL backlight cost simulation model, so can forecast that the cost of a 40′ LED backlight will reach $100 in Q4’10, a 2.8x premium over the equivalent CCFL backlight, down from 3.7x at the beginning of 2009.’