Application of Taguchi Method in Light-Emitting Diode Backlight Design for Wide Color Gamut Displays

This paper utilizes the Taguchi design method to optimize the design parameters of a light-emitting diode (LED) backlight unit for wide color gamut liquid crystal displays (LCDs). In optimizing the design, the parametric analyses consider two particular regions of the backlight unit, namely, the color-mixing zone and the extractor zone. The Taguchi experiments are configured in L₉ (3⁴ ) orthogonal arrays and are designed to evaluate the effects of the design parameters on the color-difference, optical efficiency and luminance of the unit. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results reveal that the optical efficiency and color-difference properties are determined primarily by the reflector design and the length of the color mixing zone, respectively, while the luminance to the LCD panel is affected principally by the taper angle of the optical microstructures in the extractor zone. The optimal design parameters of the color-mixing zone and extractor zone are estimated from the Taguchi S/N ratio data and the ANOVA results, and are verified via ray-tracing simulations. For an input flux of 1501 lm, the optimal design shows 0.01 of the color differences in CIE 1976 color space, 85% of the optical efficiency, and 10675 nits of luminance. Thus, the optimized backlight unit provides an ideal solution for the illumination of large-scale LCD display devices.