LG Display said on Monday it won the Sejong the Great award, the top prize at the Korean Intellectual Property Office’s 2026 Patent Technology Awards, for its “OLED TV high-integration gate driving circuit patent”. The winning patent is a technology that significantly reduces the bezel by newly designing the circuit structure and was filed in 2020 in South Korea and in the United States, Germany and China. The Patent Technology Awards select and honour outstanding inventions among patents registered with the Korean Intellectual Property Office within 10 years.

Bezel width depends heavily on the space taken up by the GIP circuit, and the smaller the space, the thinner the bezel. LG Display developed its own structure for the gate-in-panel (GIP) driving circuit that controls each pixel within the TV panel bezel by combining overlapping circuits into a single common core circuit, and filed it as a patent.

With the design change, the number of transistors making up the circuit fell 74 percent from the previous design, and the GIP circuit area shrank about 40 percent. It maintained stable display driving performance while increasing circuit integration. Applied to a 65-inch OLED TV, bezel width falls to 4.3 mm from 6.5 mm, about 34 percent thinner. The company explained that a narrower screen edge makes the appearance cleaner and increases immersion.

Higher circuit integration improved the process and raised manufacturing efficiency. The company’s cumulative cost improvement effect totals about 385 billion won so far. The high-integration GIP technology has been installed in all OLED TV panel products for 42-inch to 97-inch models since 2022, and cumulative mass production reached 28.3 million units, it said.

Lead inventor Hong-jae Shin (신홍재), a research fellow at LG Display’s large-size business division, said, “I feel great fulfilment and pride that the成果 of long-term research has been recognised as a patent and applied to actual products.” He added, “We will continue research and development to build a technology moat that breaks through limits and work to differentiate in the market.”

LG Display is also expanding the technology’s application from 2025 to OLED panels for high-performance gaming monitors. The company plans to use its ultra-slim bezel technology to boost both design differentiation and market competitiveness for its OLED products. Boo-seon Hong (홍부선), head of IP at LG Display, said, “We will focus on R&D for advanced technologies and securing key patents to solidify technology leadership.”