Manufacturing equipment - Page 12

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.

Applied Materials reported its financial results for Q2 2016, with an all-time highs in new orders and backlog. Applied says that the company is in early stages of large, multi-year industry inflections which is driving its business growth.

One of the inflections is in the display industry. In early 2016 Applied said it is seeing strategic investment from OLED display customers, and this trends now continues. Applied says it has received large OLED orders - but the market is still in the "initial phase" of OLED investments and more growth is expected ahead.

Photonics-based solutions provider Coherent reported its financial results for CYQ2 2016. Coherent received over $240 million in flat-panel display related orders, including a single order for systems in excess of $100 million. Most of these FPD orders are tied to flexible OLED production.

Coherent also said it starts to see orders for other process steps in OLED production, including Short-Pulse Lasers for film cutting and excimer lasers for Laser-Lift-Off.

ALD equipment maker Encapsulix developed a new ALD system (the Infinity 200) that is optimized for deposition on 200 mm substrates - for both R&D or manufacturing systems. The new system offers several advanced features especially suited for thin-film low-temperature encapsulation deposition on flexible substrates, particular for OLED displays.

Encapsulix announced that the new system was successfully installed and qualified for ultrafast OLED encapsulation at Leti, the CEA Tech research institute in Grenoble, France. Additional systems will be delivered in the next 12 months to customers in Asia.

In past month there were dozens of reports stating that Apple will adopt an OLED display in its 2017 or 2018 iPhone and that Apple signed an agreement with SDC to be its first OLED supplier. Apple will require a huge amount of OLED displays, even if the first device will be a premium iPhone model, which will require large capacity expansion from SDC (and other suppliers that Apple will probably need to sign up).

According to UBI Research, Apple's decision to adopt OLED displays in its iPhones will result in $13 billion of production equipment orders by 2020. The capacity required for Apple will take up 47% of the global equipment market for 6-Gen flexible OLEDs ($28.5 billion in the next 5 years, according to UBI).

In July 2015, LG Display announced it is going to invest $900 million to build a new 6-Gen flexible OLED fab. The E5 flexible OLED line will have a capacity of 7,500 monthly substrates - or 1.5 million 5.5" panels. The new fab is scheduled to begin mass production in the first half of 2017.

Yesterday LG Display said that it started to install production equipment in this upcoming new line, in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province. LG also released the nice photo you see above of the equipment transferred into the fab.

Kateeva recently announced a large $88 million Series-E funding round, and the ink-jet equipment maker today announced that Ink-Jet guru Eli Vronsky has been promoted to the company's Chief Product Officer.

During our recent visit to San Francisco, we caught up with Kateeva’s executive team on a break from their presentations on inkjet printing for flexible OLEDs. Chief Product Officer Eli Vronsky gave us an update, as well as an overview of the company’s product strategy.

As the OLED market is quickly expanding, we see massive investment in production capacity, mainly from Korea and China. According to Reuters, Canon Tokki, the leading vacuum evaporation equipment maker, is experiencing a boom in orders.

Tokki has a large order backlog - worth several years of its current production capacity. According to some reports, Tokki has turned down orders from LG Display recently as Samsung has taken up all of its capacity - and so LG had to order equipment from Tokki's competitors (mainly SFA Engineering and Ulvac).

China-based Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund (FGC) offered to buy Aixtron for €670 million ($750 million). The German production equipment maker agreed to the offer - but it still requires shareholder and regulatory approval.

Aixtron is offering OVPD deposition equipment (developed originally by Universal Display, and licensed exclusively to Aixtron) that, according to the company, offers an optimized and efficient deposition with very short cycle times compared to conventional VTE systems - which should lead to drastically reduced OLED production costs. Recently Aixtron announced that it's new Gen-8.5 OVPD demonstrator system is now available for initial customer tests.

GJM developed a new 300mm roll-to-roll deposition system that can directly deposit both organic and inorganic materials on plastic materials - and be used to mass produce flexible OLEDs. The system was developed in collaboration with the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials.

GJM says that its R2R system can speed up production times compared to current systems - by about 50% (GJM says that production amount can be improved by 1.5 times) - and so contribute to lower cost production. The system can be used to produce both OLED display and lighting panels.