LED backlight system with fiber-optic red,green, blue to white color combiner

As an application in the backlight system of small LCD display, we realized a pure white light source by mixing red, green, blue (RGB) lights using a 3 X 3 Hard Plastic Cladding Fiber (HPCF) coupler. We also proposed the 0.44 inch LED backlight system with these fiber-optic pure white sources and characterized its illumination characteristics. Using optimized fusion-tapering technique, we fabricated HPCF coupler which combines three input lights over the circularly formed waist. HPCF has the core diameter of 200 tun and clad diameter of 230 mu m. The fabricated 3 X 3 HPCF coupler has the perfect uniformity of about 0.3 dB, low insertion loss of 5.5 dB, and low excess loss of 0.8 dB which shows excellent uniform power splitting ratio. In order to improve the transmission performance, The RGB chip LEDs were butt-coup led directly to the ferruled input ports of the coupler and packaged by TO46-can type. In the produced white color by HPCF coupler, the photometric brightness at the circular endface of outputs of HPCF coupler was in a rage of 10062 - 10094 cd/M2. The fiber optic white color combiner provides tunable white sources excluding heat source and having thickness of 200 mu m. We also proposed a 0.44 inch LED backlight system with these fiber-optic pure white sources. With the proposed device, we obtain the improved uniformity in luminance distribution and wide color gamut by using the white light mixing red, green and blue lights.