Mouldshare innovation cuts backlight set-up costs

The Mouldshare manufacturing process allows many different designs (from one or many customers) to be incorporated into a single injection mould tool. This vastly reduces the setup cost associated with each individual design, and reduces minimum order quantities considerably. 

From a market position perspective, the new series bridges the gap between the company’s Profiled backlight range – which are manufactured using custom-engineered CNC profiling machines, have little or no setup costs and MOQs as low as 5 pieces - and the company’s standard moulded backlight range.

William Heath, OMC’s Commercial Director says, “Setup costs for standard moulded backlights are in the region of £5k to £10k depending on the design, and a typical MOQ would be around 20,000 units. Our Mouldshare series reduces typical setup costs to the £1k - £3.5k region, with MOQs as low as 500pcs.

As with OMC’s standard injection-moulded backlights, designs can benefit from simulated multi-source (SMS) emitting elements and integral dispersion lenses to enhance uniformity and PCBs can be incorporated into the design allowing simple 2-pin connection to the backlight and simplifying circuit design. Customers can also specify screw holes, mounting clips and other features to be moulded into their designs, reducing cost and enhancing versatility.

Adds Heath, “This new backlight series has proven very popular in our trials, as it is suitable for all standard backlight applications. A recent example of a design we manufactured using this new technology was a high brightness, high uniformity white backlight with an integrated PCB, 2 pin connection, about 35mm x 45mm in size, used for an imaging application. Our customer was delighted that we were able to introduce this with a setup NRE of under £1.5k and MOQ of 500 pieces. The extra features that this new moulding technology enables for specialist applications has opened up many possibilities for a wide range of sectors.”