From Mercury Lamps to UV LEDs: Panel Exposure Equipment Design

Application：UV exposure equipment for the flat panel display industry

Challenge：Traditional mercury lamps have become a bottleneck in exposure equipment design.。

In UV exposure processes for the panel industry, high collimation, irradiation uniformity, and long-term stability are critical factors for achieving stable mass production.

However, most UV exposure systems still rely on traditional mercury lamp light sources, which face the following challenges:

• High energy consumption, along with recycling and environmental pressures, making them unfavorable for ESG and sustainable manufacturing goals

• Required warm-up time, which reduces production line efficiency

• Limited lamp lifetime, resulting in high maintenance and replacement costs

As a result, customers have long sought to introduce UV LED light sources to replace mercury lamps. Nevertheless, significant technical barriers have remained in exposure applications.

Pain Points：

1. High technical threshold for exposure applications:

   Although UV LEDs are already mature in curing applications, challenges still exist in UV exposure processes.

2. Small-angle requirements

   Achieving high irradiation uniformity under extremely small divergence angles is technically very demanding.

Key Application Focus：

In response to customer requirements, Violumas has specifically developed a new UV LED light source module for exposure processes:

• Maintains excellent uniformity with an emission angle < 10°

• Successfully validated by customer-side testing and has replaced existing light source solutions

• Extends system lifetime and eliminates the warm-up time required by traditional light sources