Integrated light-guide plates that can control the illumination angle for liquid crystal display backlight system

Abstract

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with edge-lit backlight systems offer several advantages, such as low energy consuming, low weight, and high uniformity of intensity, over traditional cathode-ray tube displays, and make them ideal for many applications including monitors in notebook personal computers, screens for TV, and many portable information terminals, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, etc. To satisfy market requirements for mobile and personal display panels, it is more and more necessary to modify the backlight system and make it thinner, lighter, and brighter all at once. In this paper, we have proposed a new integrated LGP based on periodic and aperiodic microprism structures by using polymethyl methacrylate material, which can be designed to control the illumination angle, and to get high uniformity of intensity. So the backlight system will be simplified to use only light sources and one LGP without using other optical sheets, such as reflection sheet, diffusion sheet and prism sheets. By using optimizing program and ray tracing method, the designed LGPs can achieve a uniformity of intensity better than 86%, and get a peak illumination angle from +400 to -200, without requiring other optical sheets. We have designed a backlight system with only one LED light source and one LGP, and other LGP design examples with different sizes (1.8 inches and 14.1 inches) and different light source (LED or CCFL), are performed also.