In this context, the reverse engineering and costing company System Plus Consulting announced an in-depth analysis of the miniLEDs and their assembly in the display’s backlight unit of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2021 edition this week. The company provides a full reverse costing study of the miniLEDs and their assembly in the backlight unit of the display. 

This report provides valuable insights regarding the technical choices made by Apple Inc and the supply chain behind. It includes technology data, manufacturing cost, and selling price of the BLU, with a focus on the miniLEDs and their drivers. This analysis also highlights an estimated manufacturing cost of all the BLU’s components and a selling price analysis.

Properly designed miniLED backlights allow LCD displays to reach contrast performance close to that of OLEDs while maintaining the high brightness characteristics of LCDs. All of this while offering reduced power consumption, a very thin form factor (thickness), and cost/price competitiveness with OLED. 

“With this newest iPad Pro, Apple is really bringing this newer display technology to the consumer”, comments Dr Youssef El Gmili, director laboratory department at System Plus Consulting. “As many different supply chain and technology choices are not settled yet, this tear down report provides great insights into the choices Apple is bringing to the table.”

The new backlighting system is composed of 10,384 miniLEDs divided into 2,596 local dimming zones. The miniLEDs, which are GaN-based dies on patterned sapphire substrate, have an engineered light-emission pattern using dedicated top and back dielectric reflectors. “At System Plus Consulting, we think that they are manufactured by Epistar in Taiwan”, announces Ayari … This foundry has been created in 2017 in Taiwan. Its capacity is mainly focused on discrete LEDs, on 100mm wafer size.

The report presents the detailed process flow of the miniLEDs and proposes a key cost analysis. This front-end analysis combines the following costs: wafer, equipment, consumable, labor, clean room, and yield losses. The die cost analysis is a combination of front-end cost, probe test and dicing cost, and yield losses.

COB assembly of the more than 10,000 miniLEDS is believed to be done by TSMT in Taiwan. The miniLEDs are mounted in flip-chip configuration. The miniLEDs are driven by nine drivers from STMicroelectronics. These drivers are wafer-level chip-scale packaged. System Plus Consulting report also delivers a detailed cost analysis of the drivers. Youssef El Gmili confirms: “The main part of the backlight unit cost is due to the miniLEDs at 37 % …” The backlight unit is also part of System Plus Consulting cost analysis.

Eric Virey, Dr Zine Bouhamri, and analysts at Yole have supported the System Plus Consulting’s team during its investigation. Both analysts published a dedicated technology and market report in 2020, “Next Generation TV Panel Technology & Market Trends”. Now they comment the technical choice made by Apple and give their analysis of this backlight system including, for the first time, a miniLED technology.

Link: “MiniLED Backlight Unit in the 2021 Apple iPad Pro” report, System Plus Consulting