Digitimes, a news website covering IT in Asia is reporting that the use of LEDs as a screen backlighting technology won’t take off until later than expected. Previous forecasts had talked about a late 2006 take-up of the technology but this has now been revised to mid 2007.

Currently most backlighting is done using a power-hungry method with cold-cathode flourescent tubes (CCFT) but using high power LEDS would bring down the power requirements significantly. Having done some analysis, we agree with reports that say that current existing backlights account for 20% of the power-drain in low-useage scenarios. By using a LED backlight at least 1 watt can be saved which is up to 15% of the power useage of a UMPC.

The Extended Battery Life Working group had a meeting about LED backlighting in June and although there are no public documents yet, its clear that its one of the high priority topics for them. More info about the EBL WG is here.

As the power trade-offs with UMPC’s are more crtitical than for notebook pc’s, I’d except to see these being used sooner than mid-2007 in UMPCs. Companies such as Everlite are ready for mass-production and just waiting for customers now. Our prediction is that we’ll see the first LED backlighting in premium UMPC models in the first quarter of 2007 and a general take-up during the rest of 2007.

Steve / Chippy.