FMM - Page 4

According to reports from Korea, Samsung has started construction of a new flexible OLED fab, which will be called the A4 line. This will be Samsung's first Gen-7 line as the company is aiming to expand its technology gap over its upcoming OLED competitors who are all building Gen-6 line.

A Gen-7 line substrate is 1870x2200 mm in size - as opposed to 1500x1800 mm for Gen-6. This means that you can produce more displays per substrate and price per screen is lower. Scaling up evaporation OLED production is not so easy, but it seems that Samsung managed to solve its technologies hurdles - mainly the FMM metal masks and the LTPS annealing process.

Sunic System recently unveiled a new evaporation-FMM based AMOLED system that enables high resolution deposition - Sunic says it will enable PPI up to 2,250 PPI. Sunic's new technology makes use of a plane source for evaporating OLED materials, as opposed to the currently-used linear source. Such high resolution displays will be very useful for VR applications.

Sunic System now announced that it succeeded in implementing 1.1um shadow distance by using the new plane source evaporation and 100um shadow mask. Such a small shadow distance can achieve 1,000 to 1,500 PPI resolutions. The company's next step is to lower shadow distance to 0.37um - which will indeed enable 2,250 PPI and 11K high-resolution mobile AMOLEDs.

Korea equipment maker DAWONSIS developed a new OLED deposition process that is based on FMM but according to the company can be scalable to large-area deposition. This could theoretically enable efficient evaporation-based OLED TV production.

The so-called Joule Heating Deposition process use a large area material source (as opposed to point-sources or line-sources currently used) using a conductive film that is efficiency heated using voltage induction. According to DAWONSIS this process is scalable and also efficient in terms of material usage (which is about 70%-80%).

One of the key requirements for VR application is high-density displays, as small-sized displays are magnified to cover our whole field of view. Some estimate that realism VR demands around 2,000 PPI.

During SID 2016, Samsung announced it developed a 806 PPI AMOLED especially for VR application. This is an upgrade from current OLEDs, but still a far cry from the 2,000 PPI mentioned above.

After years of OLED R&D but no actual reports, Taiwan's Innolux is finally demonstrating its new OLED prototypes, signalling that the company is finally about to re-enter the OLED market. Innolux says that it has recently "achieved success with AMOLED technology" and now plans to continue development and ultimately mass produce AMOLED panels.

In a trade-show in Taiwan, Innolux is demonstrating several OLED prototypes. First up we have a 5.5" WQHD (2560x1440, 534 PPI) flexible AMOLED built on a plastic substrate and an LTPS backplane. The panel has a "proprietary pixel rendering methods" (perhaps PenTile like?) and uses thin-film encapsulation and is produced using an FMM mask (more on this below).

Japan's Dai Nippon Printing, the world's leader in evaporation mask (FMM) production, announced it will invest $54.6 million to triple its evaporation mask production capacity so it could meet the demand of the expanding OLED market.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, DNP's market share in the evaporation mask market is over 50%. The company's expansion will be made in several stages, but should complete by 2020. DNP aims to reach $272 million in annual sales in 2020 (triple its current sales).

Visionox developed a new high-density (604 PPI) AMOLED panel. The new 2560x1440 prototype is 4.85" in size and was deposited using FMM / VTE. It uses Visionox's Z-Type AMOLED RGB sub-pixel arrangement first demonstrated in 2014.

Visionox recently started to mass produce the company's first AMOLED panel, a 5.5" display aimed towards the mid/high smartphone market. Visionox's Gen-5.5 AMOLED line can currently produce 4,000 monthly substrate, and once yields stabilize they will reach a full capacity of 15,000 monthly substrates.

IHS says that AMOLED material consumption will increase dramatically starting in the second half of 2015 as LG Display increase WRGB (WOLED) OLED TV panel production. The market will more than threefold - reaching $165 million in H2 2015, up from $58 million in H1.

IHS forecasts that the WOLED material market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 79% from 2014 to 2019, to reach over $1.25 billion. The whole AMOLED materials market will grow at 54%, from $658 million in 2015 to $2 billion in 2019 (at a CAGR of 37%).

The OLED Association reports that Shanghai Tianma demonstrated a new 5.5" Full-HD (400 PPI) AMOLED prototype. This is the highest-resolution display ever shown by the Chinese display maker, and reportedly they have adopted a subpixel scheme not unlike Samsung's Pentile technology. To achieve the high resolution, Tianma developed a dual-FMM technology in-house.

Tianma has been developing LTPS AMOLED technology for quite a while, and according to our information they are getting ready to release the first panels in 2016. Tianma has plans for three separate OLED production lines.

Researchers from the Korean Inha University developed a new method to produce shadow masks that could lead to masks that have higher densities and are also more robust - leading to higher yields in OLED production. The team are going to transfer the technology to a company that will commercialize it.

Samsung AMOLED production

The researchers used an electrochemical processing technique to manufacture the new masks. This enables masks that are stronger (and thus fail less often) and still reach pixel densities of up to 500 PPI.