Wonderful Review of Macroblock Technology Symposium 2021 | New Product Release
Wonderful review of Macroblock Technology Symposium 2021 | New Product Release
Preface
Macroblock Technology held an online seminar on December 8th in 2021. Through the cooperation with Dream Animation, XR shooting techniques were used to create a new type of seminar in the XR studio. The flow between the scene and the speaker in the process brings out the concept that a studio can create infinite scenes; in addition, the scene changes in conjunction with the camera tracking angle, constructing an excellent immersive visual experience and breaking the virtual reality. Boundaries, the specific implementation of the hottest virtual reality application in the LED display industry during the post-epidemic period.
Innovative XR style seminar
At the opening, Chairman Yang Lichang turned into a director, and shuttled the key elements of the XR studio, including the center console, camera, scene… etc., leading the audience into the magical XR stage of the Macroblock seminar and making everyone ready in just 60 seconds. You can learn about the features of XR Studio.
Chairman Yang Lichang further explained that this year’s main axis uses the concept of “union” in mathematics, through the formula “micro-LED ∪ mini-LED ∪ LED Display ∪ LCD = Macroblock” to express that Macroblock’s driver chip product range includes a full range of Display applications. During the conference, the speakers shared market trends, innovative technologies and new product information, hoping to explore the ultimate display technology with the participants.
Virtual production of exclusive LED driver chip | 120Hz high frame rate, 16-bit grayscale, 7,680Hz refresh rate
Macroblock Technology Wu Yida’s product director shared at the opening that the XR technology in virtual production has been widely used in commercial advertising, music MV production, and film shooting. The key to virtual production lies in the cooperation between the camera and the LED display and how to shoot. Reality, how to reduce the defects of the shooting picture is the goal pursued. According to these applications, it can be analyzed that 1. At present, the dot pitch of commonly used LED displays falls between P1.5 (close-up, close-up shooting)-P2.8 (background, long-distance shooting), and the brightness requirement is 1000~2000 nits or more. It can adjust the peak brightness of the matching scene (HDR source), so the most suitable scan number of the LED driver chip is 16 scans or less to take into account the brightness and picture quality; 2. The shooting format (FPS) of the camera is the display frame of the LED display The natural multiple of the rate can be synchronized through the controller Genlock, which is the basis for flawless shooting.
But in fact, even if the LED display and the camera are synchronized, there will still be three major challenges in the picture: motion blur, scanning lines, and flickering caused by insufficient low-gray refresh rate. These display problems must be produced through a new generation of virtual production. Only dedicated driver chips can be specifically improved. This driver chip has the “PWM enhanced evolution function”. Under the condition of achieving 16-bit grayscale, the specification can support a high frame rate of 120Hz and a high refresh rate of 7,680Hz, reducing motion blur and reducing scan line problems; moreover, The unique “super-visual computing” can effectively deal with the problem of low gray flicker and at the same time greatly improve the image segmentation caused by scanning lines. Through a new generation of virtual production dedicated chips, the three major challenges of the picture can be solved, which will help achieve the goal of flawless shooting and further enhance the visual immersion effect.
High-scan architecture technology breakthrough | Optimize low-gray uniformity to enhance the excellent HDR display effect
The application of small-pitch LED displays is getting closer to the consumer market. In the past, they were mostly used as advertising billboards, and the viewing distance was tens of meters away. With technological innovation, the viewing distance has been shortened and the application range has been brought closer to consumers, such as P1.2 ~P2.5 (SMD LED) commercial all-in-one computers, P1.2~P0.5 (mini-LED) home theaters, and automotive displays with dot pitch less than P0.5 (micro-LED). Macroblock Technology’s product director Cheng Hongyi further analyzed the link between the five technical thresholds contained in these small-pitch applications and the demand for LED driver chips, including 1. The smaller the LED die size, the more accurate the driver chip current needs; 2. The use in the LED manufacturing process Formal or flip-chip solutions; 3. The application conditions of pick and place technology and mass transfer in transfer technology; 4. The selection difference of the backplane due to the pixel pitch of the target application; 5. The number of PCB layers is also the same The number of scans supported by the LED driver chip is closely related. The more the number of board layers, the greater the cost pressure; therefore, from the above five technical requirements, it can be understood that when the application point spacing continues to shrink, the related costs of process technology will increase significantly, resulting in To reduce the penetration rate of small-pitch applications in the consumer market, Macroblock has launched a new generation of 96-scan LED driver chip-MBI5265 based on these needs.
MBI5265 supports up to 96-scan design, which can reduce the chip usage by 67% compared with 32-scan driver chip. Moreover, MBI5265 has built-in PWM enhancement technology and gray-scale enhancement technology, so even under 96-scan design conditions, it can still achieve excellent HDR (16-bit|3,840Hz) display specification, but how to improve the low gray uniformity in this specification is the key to pushing the picture quality to a new high point. Due to the low gray uniformity problem (blocks, vertical stripes, horizontal stripes) ) Will result in poor image contrast and grayscale performance. The common “blocks” and “vertical stripes” in the past can be improved through high-precision channel current and digital timing; however, as the number of scans in the module design increases, The “horizontal stripes” that are caused by the inconsistent scanning current of each row due to PCB traces require the unique “uniformity optimization mode” of MBI5265 to thoroughly optimize the picture quality and present the best low-gray display power.
Highly integrated mini-/micro-LED driver solution | Perfectly import P0.4 application
In response to the miniaturization of dot pitch, in mini-/micro-LED applications, due to the limited backplane area, the driver chip needs to have both high integration and support for high-scan design features, and the line scan shared architecture can improve the backplane area utilization and achieve For smaller pitch applications. Macroblock’s MBI5864 is a highly integrated driver chip that can support up to 64 scans and achieve excellent HDR (16-bit|3840Hz) display effects. Manager Cheng Hongyi used the imported evidence to let the audience understand that the existing customers have used the MBI5864 in the BGA package for the P0.4 mini-LED module, and there is obviously still room for the backplane; in addition, the display effect can also reach a contrast ratio of 25,000:1. The temperature issue that the industry is concerned about can also be learned from the measurement data that both the mini-LED lamp surface and the backplane driver chip surface fall at about 35°C, reducing the doubts about long-term overheating and bleu display problems.
Upgrading the visual experience of gaming monitors | Full matrix area dimming mini-LED backlight driver chip equipped with variable refresh rate (VRR) technology
E-sports has always been a high threshold application for LCD. In addition to requiring high image quality and high contrast, because the signal source is generated by the GPU, each frame of the picture is fast or slow, unlike the TV which has a fixed frame rate source. Therefore, most gaming LCD monitors have built-in variable refresh rate (VRR) function to reduce display problems that are unacceptable to players such as “tearing” or “stuttering”.
Macroblock’s product director Chen Changlin mentioned that in order to pursue higher picture quality in the industry, many gaming monitors have introduced full-matrix area dimming mini-LED backlights. Different from traditional backlight technology, full-matrix area dimming mini-LED backlights. The “graphics” feature can achieve high dynamic contrast (HDR) and regional independent dimming functions, but when the mini-LED backlight does not have a variable refresh rate, it will cause the “flickering” and “uneven brightness” problems on the screen to reduce The visual entertainment of e-sports players. Therefore, Macroblock’s new generation of full-matrix area dimming mini-LED backlight chips: MBI6329, MBI6353 and MBI6334 all introduce variable refresh rate function, which can be effective whether used in static or scanning mini-LED backlight displays. Solve the problem that the vertical sync signal (Vsync.) does not match the frame rate of the picture source, and bring the ultimate visual experience to e-sports players.
Lecturers participating in Q&A (from left, Luo Jikang, Chen Changlin, Wu Yida, Jenny)