Manufacturing equipment - Page 20

Air Liquide says it has been selected to supply ultra-pure carrier and electronic specialty gases to three new fabs manufacturing advanced display technologies, such as OLEDs, LTPS, MEMS, and OLED backlighting (we assume they mean OLED lighting). The fabs are located in Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. All those fabs will produce small/medium displays for smart phones and tablets.

We know of new OLED fabs in all those locations: in Japan several companies (such as Lumiotec, Mitsubishi and Panasonic) are producing OLED lighting panels. Both CMI and AUO in Taiwan are gearing up toward AMOLED production, and in Singapore AFPD (a 4.5-Gen LTPS fab owned by AUO) is also upgrading the LTPS LCD fab to OLED production. Any of these fabs may have selected Air Liquide's product.

Riber announced they have received a new order to supply OLED effusion cells to an existing customer in Asia, supporting the customer's production line expansion. These cells will be be used to produce OLEDs for smartphones. This is a continuation of previous orders in 2010 and 2011.

Effusion cells are used in vacuum deposition processes - which is the process in which all OLED panels are made today. It's highly likely that the Asian customer is Samsung.

The US DOE announced a new round of solid-state lighting investment (it's the third one since 2010). Of the three projects selected, there's one relates to OLEDs. K-Space Associates were granted $800,000 (out of $1.2 million ) to develop high-precision measurements of OLED layers during mass production using the company's existing optical monitoring technology.

K-Space's tool will measure layer thickness and composition to ultimately improve the efficiency, color, and lifetime of OLEDs. They hope that this development will serve as a platform for future large-scale OLED production facilities.

AGC announced that it developed a carrier glass technology that can be used to laminate its 0.1 mm-thick ultra-thin glass on carrier glass. This means that current manufacturing processes can be used with AGC's ultra-thin glass without modification. AGC's ultra-thin glass offers excellent transparency, heat resistance and electrical insulation and is also flexible.

AGC is aiming towards roll-to-roll production methods, which could not use ultra-thin glass until now. The new technology uses a 0.5-mm thick carrier glass laminated on the ultra-thin glass itself. The laminated glass substrate can be handled much the same as an ordinary glass sheet: it protects the glass (from heat, chemical processes and direct contact with processing equipment) and can be easily be removed after processing.

Samsung is getting ready to release flexible OLEDs soon, and have announced that these displays will be branded as YOUM displays. Today the OLED association released some interesting information regarding Samsung's flexible OLED manufacturing program. According to this report, products that use these displays will be introduced in Q4 2012, while mass production will begin as early as next month.

Back in May 2011 Samsung announced a joint venture with Japan's Ube Kosan to develop and produce polyimide resin - to be used as substrates for their flexible displays in a $18 million investment. Now we hear that the curing equipment for the hardened polyimide will be provided by Korea's Tera Semicon.

VG Scienta announced a new OLED deposition system, the OFT EDGE. The OFT (Organic Flexible Transparent) system can be used to deposit and analyse organic and inorganic layers on flexible and solid substrate.

The OFT Edge technology provides low temperature deposition of TCO, metals, small molecule deposition for organics, and an interchangeable modular construction with a wide selection of both deposition and analytical tools that can be attached to the systems to further increase the flexibility of the tool. VG Scienta offers ALD modules, XPS/UPS modules, STM, IR, and AFM modules. Modules within the system can be used as either standalone units when combined with a fast entry load lock or can be fully integrated into the multi-purpose cluster tool in conjunction with a central handler.

Konica Minolta has successfully developed a high-accuracy inkjet head capable of 1-picoliter drop size, the first for printed electronics applications. The new print head utlilizes the company's proprietary MEMS technologies for the first time. KM will start offering the new inkjet printhead (the KM128SNG-MB) in sample quantities by this spring.

The new print head is resistant to various inks required for industrial applications and suitable to use with low-viscosity inks. It can be used for all sorts of applications, including OLED display patterning and OLED lighting thin air coating.

Tokyo Electron (TEL) performed a re-organization, and as part of that they established a new OLED department (called the "organic EL division"), to be managed by Takeshi Okubo. This is good news and probably means that the company is putting a greater emphasis on OLED manufacturing equipment development.

TEL is developing OLED TV printing equipment together with Seiko Epson. In September 2011 it was reported that the two companies will launch an inkjet-printed OLED TV production plant in 2012 or 2013.

Colnatec demonstrated a new "self regenerating" OLED film thickness sensor system, called the Tempe. The system includes a new heat resistant quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and a unique temperature controlled sensor housing and measurement electronics. The Tempe provides real-time, in-situ, ultra high accuracy process sensor that periodically renews itself, making it operational for hundreds of hours without fail.

The new crystal (which they call the RC cut quartz crystal) is immune to radiation and stress induced frequency shifts. When the RC is coated in the thin film process it changes its frequency - which gives the thickness measurement.

Jusung Engineering reports that they managed to developed a a new metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technology to apply IGZO for use on flat panels. Jusung says they are the only company to develop an 8-Gen MOCVD IGZO tool, and that this technology will be compatible with future OLED display processes. We talked to Jusung and they say that they are already in talks with several potential clients (in Japan, China and Korea) and they hope to get purchase orders and start shipping equipment in the middle of 2012.

There are other methods (such as sputtering) for IGZO production. Sharp will soon start to produce IGZO displays in their upcoming production line, and over the past year we've seen IGZO OLED prototypes by Sony, Toshiba, AUO and other companies. Most (or all) of these prototypes have been developed using sputtering. Jusung claims that MOCVD will enable higher resolution than sputtering - indeed 4 or even 5 times higher! They also say that scaling sputtering to 8-Gen will be difficult, while their own MOCVD tool will be scalable up to these sizes easily.