In September 2013, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron (TEL) announced that the two companies will merge into a new company to be called Eteris.
Today, more than 18 months after the announcement, it was reported that the merger was cancelled due to regulatory concerns. It turns out that the US Department of Justice told the companies that their proposals for a combined business were not good enough to replace the competition lost from a merger.
Both companies are engaged with OLED manufacturing equipment. Applied Materials is offering two film deposition systems suitable for LTPS or Oxide-TFT backplane deposition (for both LCD and OLEDs panels). The AKT-PX-PECVD system (shown below) is sed to deposit LTPS films on large glass substrates (sized from 1.6 m2 to 5.7 m2). The AKT-PiVoT PVD system is used to deposit metal oxide-based TFTs (IGZO in particular).
TEL is working on OLED printing equipment together with Seiko Epson. The companies signed an agreement in 2011 to jointly-develop OLED display manufacturing technology that will integrate Epson's inkjet printing method and TEL's production equipment.
