Cymber says they are beginning to roll out lasers for OLED manufacturing, through their TCZ display division. They have already installed their first system in an unnamed customer in South Korea (probably Samsung Mobile Display. If all goes as planned, consumers could see the first OLED displays made with TCZ tools in time for Christmas), and it plans to deliver the 2nd one in another unnamed customer in China by the end of October.
One of the key innovations underlying TCZ’s OLED technology is a process that creates a uniform grid of transistors on the semiconducting material that forms a thin-film base layer on a screen’s backplane, or control layer. Each transistor in the grid controls a light-emitting diode, and each LED illuminates a single pixel. Another key innovation involves depositing one of three proprietary organic compounds precisely atop each LED to make a red, green, or blue pixel.
One of the trickiest steps in the OLED manufacturing process is melting the 50-nanometer layer of silicon semiconductor used in the backplane to form a poly-crystalline semiconductor that bonds to the glass—without melting the glass itself. By working with Carl Zeiss, Cymer developed a technique for using a 600-watt, deep-ultraviolet laser to melt the silicon semiconductor layer. The method, which operates a high-power, Xenon-Fluoride laser much like a line scanner, generates temperatures of 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius) on the thin-film surface, yet the temperature of the glass underneath never rises more than 10 degrees.
Cymer estimates that TCZ’s innovation will lower the cost of making the poly-crystalline layer by 30 percent to 50 percent. TCZ will sell the OLED-making tools at a range of $7 million to $12 million per system.
