Display Product of the Year

Product Name: Dual Status Profiled Backlights™

Company: OMC (UK) Ltd

Entry Statement

OMC is one of the longest-established specialist manufacturers of optoelectronics in Europe. A pioneer in the development, manufacture and application of LED and fibre-optic technologies, the company has four divisions – Fibre Optics, LED Backlights and Optical Mouldings, Discrete Optoelectronic Components and Semiconductor (LED) Lighting – and manufactures in its purpose-built facility located in Cornwall. OMC’s global customer base spans a wide range of industry sectors, including power distribution, lighting, petrochemical, medical, aerospace and defence.

Dual Status Profiled Backlights™ combine two colours of emitter in a single profiled backlight, enabling designers to use the single backlight source to indicate status very clearly, rather than a single colour backlight that is simply on or off. Dual Status Profiled Backlights provide a clean, bright and clear display to ensure the machine-human interface is easy to read. As robust components with an extended product life, Dual Status Profiled Backlights can be used in multiple applications and industries, including harsh environment applications such as the petrochemical industry (explosive gas detector systems, display systems for oil pipeline valves, gas and electricity metering) and in research, instrumentation and medical applications (life support system displays, imaging applications, measurement instrument displays).

Dual Status Profile Backlights bring benefits to industrial applications where colour backlights have not previously been a practical solution for displays, as they solve the additional cost and reliability issues around adding multiple LEDs to a design. Dual Status Profiled Backlights are easy to drive, take up less space in a design and provide a cost-effective solution. The two colours indicate status very clearly and they can be seen even from an oblique angle. Temperature status is a common application, where the use of a red LED emitter alongside a green LED emitter, enables a fast “switch to red” warning.

Dual Status Profiled Backlights have four pins – two cathodes and two common anode pins, so each chip is individually addressable – and contain two LED chips of the desired contrasting colours, which range through ultrabright blue, four greens, three yellows, orange, three reds, ultrabright white and red, green, blue.

OMC pioneered the introduction of LEDs as a backlighting technology over twenty years ago with its Profiled Backlight range, and invented the side-firing backlight emitter, which illuminates backlights in a wide range of colours and brightness levels. The Dual Status Profiled Backlights are a further development of the company’s award-winning technology and its unique manufacturing techniques, which produces any quantity cost-effectively, from less than ten parts to tens of thousands, with samples available in as little as five working days.