Speaker: Greg Neal, Principal Engineer, Video Algorithms
Title: The LED Backlight Balancing Act
Abstract: The past two or three years have seen a significant increase in the use of LEDs to provide a backlight for LCDs. The common LED backlight techniques will be described very briefly, but the focus of the presentation will discuss the advantages, methods and problems related to local-dimming LED backlights. Some of the LED backlit TVs on the market today use local dimming, but none that we have seen so far are fully optimized, so the improvement in display quality is barely noticeable. We have been working on a local dimming LED backlight controller for three years, and are now able to achieve a very noticeable improvement in contrast ratio, with an average power reduction around 60%, while introducing few artifacts. There will be a demonstration of a production 47” LED backlit LG TV with all the electronics (except TCON) replaced with ours. STMicroelectronics (www.st.com) is the 5th largest semiconductor company in the world (2009 sales were US$ 8.5B). Around two years ago ST acquired Genesis Microchip to help achieve the goal of gaining significant world market share of the TV SoC (System on Chip) devices.
Speaker Background: Greg has been Principal Engineer, Video Algorithms for 10 years, originally at Genesis Microchip, now at STMicroelectronics (since the Genesis acquisition two years ago). Starting in 1972 Greg worked mainly on electronics hardware, and firmware, originally in England, moving to Silicon Valley in 1991. He is the inventor on 12 granted US patents, and 8 filed US patents, mostly related to improving the image quality of LCD monitor and TV displays. For the past 3 years Greg has worked mainly on a local-dimming LED backlight controller for LCD TVs.
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