Your Guide To LCD Television

One of the world leading LCD panel factories located in Paju, South Korea. It a city in Gyeonggi Province, located just south of Korean capital city, Seoul (for map link of Paju city, click here). 20-story buildings filled with equipment that’s moving glass too big to fit in living room at great speed, and then with great precision, turning the glass into the panels that go into TVs.

LG Display LCD Panel Factory - Paju, South Korea

The first thing to understand about such factories is they are huge. This particular facility currently has two panel factories: One is a “Gen 7″ factory capable of creating “motherglass” that is 1,950 by 2,250 mm, and the other is a “Gen 8″ factory, which can create glass that is 2,200 by 2,500 mm. The Gen 7 factory turns can turn its glass into eight 42-inch LCD TV panels or six 47-inch LCD TV panels; the Gen 8 factory can do 8 47-inch LCD TV panels, 6 55-inch LCD TV panels, or 18 32-inch LCD panels from each piece of mother-glass.

LG Display Gen 8 LCD Factory

Overview of LCD Panel and Mother-Glass

The current LCD process works by sandwiching liquid crystals between two pieces of large, specially treated sheets of mother glass. Huge machines take the first of these layers and build a “thin film transistor” layer on top of it. This transistor layer creates what is known as “active matrix LCD,” the kind used in notebooks, monitors, and TVs.

The other glass layer typically contains a color filter and a polarizing film. By detecting changes in voltage, the transistors control the amount of light being let through at any place in the display, and the liquid crystals let the light through for each of the sub-pixels: the red, green, and blue as defined on the color filter. This very complex process creates what is known as the LCD panel itself.

LG Display uses a technology called “In-Plane Switching” (or IPS, as per Panasonic LCD display technology – IPS), which aligns the liquid crystal cells in a horizontal direction, as opposed to “Vertical Alignment,” which some other makers use. LG believes this gives their displays a better viewing angle and says it consumes less power. But the panel is only part of a modern display. Another facility at the site takes the panels and turns them into LCD modules, which means adding various other layers, such as controllers to direct the TFT display, diffusers and prisms, light guides, and perhaps most obviously, the backlighting unit. The vast majority of TVs today use fluorescent backlighting, though LED backlighting is now common in notebook displays, and LED or edge-lighting is now entering the high-end TV market.

Automated LCD Panel Inspection Test

Once the module is created, it then typically gets sent to another site (and another company), which adds the tuner and other electronics and the case it needs to become a TV. At the Paju facility, the LCD panel factories are as tall as a 20-story building, though they only actually have 4 floors of manufacturing. That’s because the machines that move the glass and etch the lines that make the transistors are enormous.

The module building is smaller, about 6 stories tall–though actually a lot more people work in that building (as the panel process is so automated.) LG Display has about 7,800 workers at the plant; and the whole enterprise (including a nearly facility that makes chemicals and the glass) employs about 15,000 people. The facility even has a dormitory for 5,700 of the workers.

The facility is located in Paju, which is northwest of Seoul, within site of the DMZ. And the facility has space for three more panel factories, though the company has not yet announced any specific plans.

The facility has a showroom for showing off the company’s technology–from viewing angles of current TVs to the company’s 240-Hz panels (done by scanning the backlight) to technology for 3D TVs.

LG Display LCD TV Show Room with 240Hz TV

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