On the 16th, LG Innotek (CEO Moon, Hyuksoo) announced that it will accelerate its targeting of the global automotive lighting module market with ‘Nexlide (Next Lighting Device)’ to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of its commercialization this year.
For a long period of time, automotive lighting remained a simple lighting device that assists drivers in safely operating a vehicle by providing clear visibility and delivering signals.
Automotive lighting has begun to receive renewed attention, with premium car manufacturers focusing on brand differentiation through the design of elegant automotive exteriors.
- Automotive Lighting Module ‘Nexlide’ won 146 cumulative orders and its annual average sales grew 47%
LG Innotek’s automotive flexible 3D lighting module, ‘Nexlide’ is rated as a next-generation vehicle lighting solution in line with aforementioned trend of future mobility, receiving interest from global car makers.
‘Nexlide’ can be freely applied to various areas of a vehicle such as daytime running lights, RCL (Rear Combination Lamp, including tail lights, stoplights, and turning lights), etc.
LG Innotek unveiled a total of 9 line-ups, starting with the mass production of ‘Nexlide-A’ in 2014 and concluding with ‘Nexlide-M’, which was successfully developed last year and recently commenced mass production. ‘Nexlide’ is installed on 88 car models of 9 car manufacturer brands around the world, including North America, Europe, Japan, China, and Korea, and can be seen on roads in all corners of the globe.
‘Nexlide’ showed a sharp growth in annual average sales of 47% for the past decade, and was reborn as the major product of LG Innotek’s electronic components business. The cumulative orders ‘Nexlide’ won last month was a staggering 146 orders.
- “The thickness to be thinner, and the light brighter and more even”…Freedom of Design and Power Efficiency ‘Boosted’
‘Nexlide’ is produced by attaching multiple light source packages, optical resin, which is a material that bands flexibly, and high-performance & highly reliable optical films applied with LG Innotek’s proprietary optical micro pattern technology on a thin substrate. LG Innotek has secured exclusive technologies related to ‘Nexlide’ by acquiring over 200 technology patents.
Before ‘Nexlide’ was developed, to realize a surface light source (light source in which the surface lights up evenly and has no thickness), parts such as ‘Inner Lense,’ which enables light to spread evenly on a point light source, had to be used.
However, with LG Innotek’s patented technology, more than 20% of the number of parts that needed to be added were reduced. The secret behind slimming the module was these technologies. The slimmer the module, the more efficient the spatial utilization was, and the greater the degree of design freedom in car design.
In the case of ‘Nexlide-M,’ the latest model, LG Innotek introduced a new engineering method that completely eliminated air gaps and successfully slimmed the module by 30% compared to existing products.
Another strength and advantage of ‘Nexlide’ is the improved brightness of the vehicle lights while the thickness is minimized. ‘Nexlide-M’ increased the brightness by 4 times compared to existing products, and can emit lights up to 500cd(candela, a unit representing the brightness of a light source), which meets the global legal standard for DRLs (Daytime Running Lights).
While achieving the highest level of brightness in the industry, customers can now customize the color and brightness according to the purpose and installation location of the lighting by utilizing the diverse line-up of ‘Nexlide.’
Another advantage of using ‘Nexlide’ is that it can help reduce electric consumption. Nexlide can produce sufficient brightness with low electric power even as the module brightness increases. Especially in the case of EVs (Electric Vehicles), since it can reduce the electricity mileage (fuel efficiency of EVs), the added value of ‘Nexlide’ is enhanced in the future mobility era.
- ‘Pixel Lighting’ supporting V2V & V2P Communication…”aiming to complete development by next year”
In the recent automobile market, there is a trend to expand the role of vehicle lights compared to the past. For example, lights are now being used to facilitate communication between drivers (V2V) and drivers and pedestrians (V2P) by installing lights on the vehicle grill, or indicating the driving condition of an autonomous vehicle with specific colors.
In line with such trends, LG Innotek aims to complete the development of pixel lighting (lighting design that repeatedly arranges small 3D lights) that can display various phrases and animation effects by 2025.
In addition to this, the company is planning to expand its customer base to middle and low-priced EV OEMs by developing the ‘Next-Generation Nexlide’ which has enhanced energy efficiency.
Byaeng kuk Yoo, the head of the electronic component business division and executive director of LG Innotek said ‘LG Innotek has proven its capabilities in the vehicle lighting module business through the ‘Nexlide’ product for the past decade.” He added, “We will introduce new products to provide differentiated customer values and foster the vehicle lighting module into a business worth billions of Dollars.
Meanwhile, according to Reports Insights, a global market survey agency, the size of the global automotive lighting market is 21.9 billion USD as of 2022, and is forecasted to grow to 32.1 billion USD by 2030.
