LG Display has revealed how artificial intelligence is being integrated into its display design processes in numerous ways, reducing the time it takes to complete tasks that once required months, to as little as a few days.
Following these early initiatives, LG Display has plans to incorporate AI into all areas of display development, design and production, said Lee Hee-dong, head of the company’s newly formed Design AI team.
Hee-dong revealed the plans during an online seminar on August 5, stating that the company had decided to make 2025 the "inaugural year” of AI innovation, with plans to expand its self-developed AI tools across all of its business areas.
The company believes that it can strengthen the business structure of its organic light-emitting diode supply business by using AI to accelerate design, reduce its costs and boost its overall profitability, the executive added.
Hee-dong’s comments were first reported by ChosenBiz, which revealed that the company has already been using an AI-powered design tools since the middle of last year, helping to enhance its productivity and generate a “profitability improvement effect” of more than 200 billion won (around £107.2 million). Moreover, by building its AI assistant-based system independently, it saved itself around 10 billion won in costs that would otherwise have been spent on external systems.
The company is now piloting an AI-powered “edge design” system that’s able to automate the design of irregular-sized display panels.
Irregular displays include those with curved shapes or extremely thin bezels, and they’re extremely tricky to create, Hee-dong said. Previously, it used to take a lot of effort to design the compensation patterns of these irregular panels, because they had to be carefully matched to the outer edge of the display. As such, when designing irregular displays, the company had to create an original structural compensation pattern for each new model. It was an arduous, time-consuming process that resulted in frequent errors and defects, and when that happened, it would inevitably mean beginning again from scratch. Because of the trial and error involved, it would take about one month on average to create a single design that worked.
So Hee-dong and his team set about building an “edge design AI algorithm” that’s able to automate the design of compensation patterns for irregular-shaped displays. The AI creates the necessary patterns and then puts the prototype through simulated tests to ensure that no defects are likely. Through this, LG Display has managed to reduce the time it takes to finalise a single design from 30 days to around eight hours.
In addition, LG Display has also created its own “AI production system”, which is used to investigate the cause of any anomalies that appear during its OLED manufacturing processes and recommend fixes for those problems. Because of this, the company has been able to accelerate its quality improvement processes from an average of 23 days to just two days, generating cost benefits of approximately 20 billion won. Additionally, the system enables the company’s quality control teams to work on higher value tasks, such as applying improvement measures, rather than spending hours on manually collating and analysing data.
Hee-dong also talked about the company’s AI assistant “HI-D”, which enhances the productivity of individual employees with tools such as knowledge search, real-time translation, automated notetaking, email summaries and draft writing.
