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News Release from: Omron Corp | Subject: Light module for clamshell-type mobile phones
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 22 October 2004
Light goes back and front for clamshell
designs
Omron Corp has developed the world's first reversible light module for clamshell-type mobile phones.
Omron Corp has developed the world's first reversible light module for clamshell-type mobile phones Until today, two backlight modules and two liquid crystal displays were needed for the clamshell-type phone display, but with this development both the main and subdisplays can be created with only one liquid crystal display and one reversible light module
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 17 Jan 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The reversible light module was developed as an application of "ultrafine replication processing technology", which is one of the company's core technologies.
The main display uses the backlight, and the subdisplay uses the front light so that both displays can be realised with one light module.
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In October 2003, Omron announced the development of its original front light technology, to which it has now successfully added backlight functionality.
Worldwide demand for mobile phones in recent years has showed trends toward clamshell designs, as the use of mobile phones broadens from voice to include datacommunications with text and images.
Screen displays have become finer, but larger, and demand for smaller dimensions continues to increase.
25% of the worldwide market for mobile phones in 2003 was for clamshell-type designs at 1.4 billion units, and in Japan where the level of datacommunications usage is high, roughly 70% were of clamshell design.
In China, where rapid growth for the handset market is expected, it is also expected that demand will increase even more as screens become larger, driven by datacommunications and camera use.
Omron will be emphasizing marketing efforts in Asia, and focusing on China, in order to bring the reversible light module to the market.
In order to integrate the backlight and front light functions in the reversible light, two new concepts were developed: "double prism" and "nanoprism" technology.
Double prism technology realises sheetless composition of the lighting module by integrating the directivity transform function of external optical sheets onto the light guide itself, which is necessary for improving the brightness of the backlight.
The conventional backlight module requires several optical sheets to increase brightness by narrowing the directivity of emitted light from the light guide.
However, when these optical sheets are applied to the reversible light, the brightness on the backlight side may increase, but the diffusion effect degrades the image quality displayed on the front light side.
Therefore, for the reversible light, the brightness of the backlight must be controlled without the presence of the optical sheet.
To achieve this a subprism structure was added in to the current prism configuration, achieving the result of focusing the emitted light without the use of optical sheets.
This also realises a 130% increase in the brightness of emitted light.
Nanoprism technology improves the light guide's transparency, which is required by the front light technology.
When viewing an image on the front light side, there was a problem that the image would become whitish due to the reflection of light from the light guide surface.
In the development of the front light technology last year, Omron succeeded in reducing the reflected light by integrating 200nm pitched fine structures on the light guide.
With the reversible light module., reflected light was further reduced by narrowing the pitch of the structures by 50%, to 100nm.
This development realised a subdisplay with a higher contrast and a clearer image (1.5 times improvement by in-house comparison).
With these technologies, the diffusion and prism sheets are no longer required for the backlight, and this allows the reduction of the films cost and the manufacturing steps of the display.
Furthermore, as a front light, the improvement of the transparency allows less fuzzy and significantly higher contrast ratio of the display image on the subdisplay.
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