Corning - Page 4

Corning and Samsung Mobile Display are going to establish a new equity venture for the manufacture of specialty OLED glass substrates in Korea. The new venture will combine Corning's Lotus Glass substrate technology with SMD's OLED display expertise - and will provide product solutions for current and future OLED technologies.

The new venture will produce glasses for all OLED sizes: for small mobile panels to large OLED TV panels. It'll be interested to hear whether this new venture will also develop flexible glass displays, as envisioned in Corning's "Day made of glass" concept video:

Corning launched a new glass called Lotus Glass, which was developed for cutting-edge displays - such as OLEDs and next-gen LCDs (based on LTPS and Oxide-TFTs). Corning explains that the new glass has a high annealing point that delivers the thermal and dimensional stability required by these new high-performance displays. Lotus Glass has already been qualified and is now in production.

Lotus Glass's intrinsic stability means it can withstand the manufacturing thermal cycles better than conventional glass, and so enable tighter design rules needed in advanced backplanes (which are needed for high resolution and fast response time). It's good to see a new glass substrate from Corning, although we're still waiting for Corning's future flexible glass as shown in their "Day made of glass" video released a few months ago (which features future designs made with durable, transparent and even flexible glass displays):

Corning says they developed a new glass for OLED TVs. Corning says that they believe in OLEDs - and the technology "will develop to become important to the display industry in the future and will require new glass compositions to maximize OLED potentials".

Corning estimates that in 2011, the demand for OLED TV glass will be around 10 million square feet. LCD TV Glass will amount to about 3 billion square feet...

Corning developed a new ultra-slim flexible glass that can be used as a barrier film for flexible OLED displays. Corning claims that this new glass has the same barrier performance (for oxygen and moisture) as normal rigid glass. The whole thing is just 100 microns thick (0.1mm) and can withstand heat up to 400 degrees.

Corning is still developing the manufacturing process of this material, we do not know when it will be commercialized. A while back Corning published a nice video (a day made of glass) showing what's possible with flexible glass.

Here's a really nice video produced by Corning - showing future designs made with durable, transparent and even flexible glass displays. A lot of these displays can be achieved with OLEDs, although it's not specifically mentioned in this video. Still, it's beautifully done:

Corning says that Samsung is using their Gorilla glass in the Galaxy S phone. The glass is used as a protective layer for Samsung's Super-AMOLED display. Gorilla glass is an environmentally friendly alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass that is both scratch resistant and durable.

Samsung Galaxy S

The Galaxy S has a 4" WVGA 800 X 480 Super-AMOLED display. AT&T is selling this phone for $49.99, calling it the Samsung Captivate. You can buy the Galaxy S unlocked for $599.

Corning and the Soitec group have agreed to work on the development of high-performance silicon-on-glass (SiOG) substrates for OLED displays for mobiles.

Corning's silicon-on-glass technology, currently in development, is a thin, single-crystal silicon film applied to Corning display glass. This development is expected to produce an engineered substrate with outstanding electrical mobility and material uniformity, upon which electronic circuits can be easily applied by display manufacturers.

Soitec's proprietary Smart Cut™ technology is used to transfer ultra-thin single crystal layers of wafer substrate material (such as silicon) onto another surface. This technique is used to fabricate more than 90 percent of SOI production wafers in the semiconductor industry.

Corning is showing their latest Silicon-On-Glass (SiOG) technology. SiOG is used to transfer a thin-film of silicon into a display substrate. SiOG is scalable, and currently Corning can make it on a Gen2 substrate, Gen4 by the end of the year.

Corning SiOG prototype

The SiOG process would permit the fabrication of stable OLED pixel switches with higher yield and much greater performance than LTPS, and on larger substrates. Corning claims that costs will be lower, because this enables manufacturers to integrate the circuitry on the display substrate easily. 

Some panel makers are already trying this out, and hopefully we'll see prototype OLED displays based on SiOG by the end of 2009.

There's a new OLED group that has just been formed - the OLED Association (OLED-A). The group is managed by Barry Young (Former senior VP, Display Search).

There are ten members in the group - Cambridge Display/Sumitomo, Corning, DuPont, Kodak, eMagin, Ignis, MicroEmissive Displays, Novaled, OLED-T, Samsung SDI, and Universal Display, and OLED-A are working to add more members.

Corning has announced some a couple of new  interesting technologies related to OLEDs and glass -

• Jade(TM) - a fusion-formed glass with high thermal stability designed to enable smaller devices with brighter displays, higher resolution, and longer battery life. Jade's attributes also enable optimal backplane performance for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), self-luminous displays that use organic compounds to emit light displays.
• Vita(TM) - a scalable hermetic sealing solution that locks out moisture and air from OLED displays, improving their longevity. Together, Jade and Vita will help OLED technology scale to larger applications.

Read more here (TMCNet)