Chipone Technology is a semi-conductor chip design house in China. Its products include touch sensor ICs, fingerprint recognition ICs, display driver ICs, and power management ICs. Chipone acquired and merged a US company (iML) in 2016. After their financial statements were consolidated, in 2018 the Group's total revenue reached RMB 1.21 billion, and the Group focuses on raising its gross profit.

LEDinside has an honor to interview the No.1 LED display IC player- Chipone's Vice President, Charles Lin, and Marketing Director, Mr. Hank Zhang. They explained Chipone's product strategies of LED driver IC in video wall (digital display) applications.

In 2017, Chipone's LED display IC revenue was about RMB 450 million. In comparison, in 2018, its LED display IC revenue came to RMB 600 million. The shipment volume of Chipone LED display IC arrived at 2,600 KK pieces to become the first display IC player in the world.

Chipone has constantly pumped out innovative products, carefully listened to customers' requests and needs, followed the design idea "Less Is More", and improved product integration with different technologies.

Fine-pitch display driver IC is trending. Therefore, Chipone debuted its new chips with higher scan lines in 2019. The specification of a new chip's power consumption per piece is reduced, in order to enhance the ability of thermal dissipation.

Hence, for the product ICND2065 (common anode) and ICND2069 (common cathode), they both are 16-channel and 64 scan-line products. From display vendor' perspective, because the new LED driver IC's necessary quantity is fewer, the ability of thermal dissipation is greatly improved. Meanwhile, the image quality is supported by the 14-bit gray scale and a high refresh rate. 

In respect of cinema LED screen driver IC, Chipone steadily launched upgraded products: ICND2055 and ICND2200. These two products satisfy cinematic market's request: when the brightness rate is low, a high color gray scale is still excellently displayed, and HDR function is featured. In this way, display quality and usability of ICND2055 and ICND2200 are remarkably better than existing products in the market.

ICND2200 is a 24-channel and 16 scan-line products. It can satisfy the ultra-fine-pitch market's request: its pitch is narrower than P1.0. Currently, customers use this product for P0.75~P0.95 fine-pitch displays.

From PCB manufacturers' perspective, in the past, when other products were used, 8 layers of PCB were needed. In comparison, if they use ICND2200, only 6 layers of PCB are necessary. In this way, the design of PCB's trace width or spacing will become easier.

For the cinematic market's HDR request, Chipone's Cinema LED Screen driver IC ICND2055 amazingly satisfies this quest. With HDR technology, it perfectly presents video's higher dynamic range effect (HDR), enhances the contrast ratio in any dark scene, and clearly depicts greater details of shadows under a bright sky. In the showroom of Chipone, many customers personally experience the visual impacts of "Extreme Cool Gamut."

ICND2055 converts serial input data into the gray scale of each pixel by a 16-bit shift register. In other words, its display quality uniformity is great. ICND2055 supports HDR function, saves energy and dissipates heat well. Its EMI performance is better than traditional structure is. Therefore, after ICND2055 is debuted, in the fine pitch LED industry, the major customers give high credits. In particular, in the high-end exporting projects, ICND2055 is used massively.

ICND 2076 is a 48-channel and 64 scan-line (at the most) products. Under dynamic adjustment, it can achieve much energy saving.

Last but not least, Chipone talks about its overseas market development. Chipone has entered the supply chain of internationally-famous display manufacturers, such as Daktronics, Lighthouse, D3 LED, BARCO, Samsung and LGE. Chipone continues raising revenues from overseas markets.