Oxide TFT - Page 11

Back in September we posted that AUO managed to achieve 50% yield in its AMOLED fab, and is set to start mass production. Now we hear from AUO's vice president Dagang Wu that the company is still facing technical issues and will have to delay mass production to 2013. Hopefully this means early 2013. AUO is optimistic that AMOLED will start replacing LCDs in mobile phones starting in 2013 (or 2014).

AUO hoped to start AMOLED mass production in Q3 2012 (which was also a delay from the original plan). AUO will make 4.3" qHD panels (257 ppi), and according to some industry insiders AUO already signed up HTC, Asus and possible Sony for those panels.

In February 2012 ASUS unveiled the Padfone - an Android smartphone with a tablet docking station. The display of the phone was a 4.3" qHD (800x600) Super AMOLED. Yesterday ASUS unveiled the Padfone 2 - and this time the phone uses a 4.7" 720p IPS+ LCD panel. The LCD is made by Sharp and uses their IGZO backplane.

Sharp announced a new mobile phone - the first one with an IGZO Oxide-TFT backplane. The Aquos Zeta SH-02E, bound for NTT DoCoMo will have a 4.9" 1280x720 display. Other features include a quad-core 1.5Ghz CPU, Android 4.0, LTE and NFC. The phone will start shipping before the end of 2012.

Back in April 2012, Sharp announced that they have begun to produce Oxide-TFT based LCDs at their Kameyama Plant #2 - and now indeed we see the first product to use the new technology. Sharp says that these displays will have smaller TFTs and thus increased pixel transparency - which leads to lower power consumption.

The South China University of Technology (SCUT) unveiled some new AMOLED technologies: a 5" transparent AMOLED panel, an Oxide-TFT based OLED and an integrated touch AMOLED panel.

SCUT is collaborating with Guangzhou New Vision Optoelectronic and together established a small production line that can already produce these kinds of displays (5-inch to 7-inch in size) in small volume.

DisplaySearch says that the AMOLED market is expected to grow almost tenfold from 2012 (2.3 million square meters) to 2016 (22 million square meters). DisplaySearch are basing their forecast on planned investments, and they say that most of the capacity increase will be driven by OLED TV production.

While Samsung has been successful in improving yields for small OLED production (to an almost-LCD level) and thus enabling an only 30% premium over LCDs, producing large OLED panels is still very expensive - mainly due to low yields and high material costs.

AUO's president, Paul Peng, reiterated the company's plans to start AMOLED mass production in Q3 2012. AUO will make 4.3" panels featuring 257 ppi. Peng also reveals that the company is co-developing in-cell touch AMOLED panels together with some handset makers, and will have samples ready by H2 2013.

There are also reports that AUO plans to introduce large-size OLED panels by the end of 2012. The company is reportedly working in cooperation with Japan-based firms to develop those panels. The AMOLEDs will be produced in AUO's 6-Gen R&D line and be based on Oxide-TFT backplanes.

A new company called Stimulated Blue Technology was established a couple of months ago in Henan, China, with an aim to produce small OLED panels based on its patented blue-coating technology, developed by Xinyang Normal University. It's not clear what this technology is, but according to the article it involves some sort of blue-coating or filter layer and only red and green OLED emitters. I'm not sure what does that mean exactly, or how is that possible...

The company is setting up a 4.5-Gen (730x920 mm) fab in Henan that will produce Metal-Oxide TFT based OLEDs. The capacity will be 360,000 substrates a year. The same fab will include two OLED lines and one LED-LCD line. The total investment for the OLED lines is 2.2 billion yuan (about $345 million) Apparently the company is confident it will be able to raise the required funds. The first OLED line is scheduled for the end of 2012, and the second one for 2014.

Back in November 2011 AUO unveiled a 4" flexible AMOLED prototype. Today the same panel won the "Outstanding Photonics product award" at the Display Taiwan 2012 conference. Here's a video showing the display. You can skip to 2:43 if you want to see a closeup footage of the AMOLED panel, showing how AUO setup a nice mechanism that keeps bending it:

AUO's 240x320 4" panel is made on an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane, is a bottom-emitting device and it's only 0.3mm thick and can be bent with a curvature radius of 10mm.

Just before SID, the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) announced that they managed to fabricate the world's largest (7.4") flexible (bendable) OLED using Mixed-Oxide TFTs. Those MO-TFTs deliver high performance (fast switching speeds and reduced power consumption), are quite cost-effective and can be produced on existing a-Si production lines. The FDC demonstrated this panel at SID.

This OLED panel was developed with funding from the US Army features 480x360 (81 ppi) resolution, has an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and is built on a PEN (polyethylene naphthalate) substrate. It was developed in collaboration with Universal Display, DuPont (Teijin film), Sunic and Henkel.

RiTdisplay is a PMOLED producer based in Taiwan that has several production lines making PMOLED panels. A few years ago it was considered the world's largest PMOLED maker, although I now hear that due to financial problems the company shut down some of their PMOLED lines (this isn't confirmed though).

At SID 2012, RiTdisplay showed several PMOLED panels, and some 3.5" AMOLED panels. RiTdisplay is Ignis' production partner for its a-Si compensation technology, which basically enables a-Si to be used as a backplane for AMOLED panels (instead of LTPS or Oxide-TFT). This should enable cheaper AMOLEDs. You can read more about this technology at my Ignis-at-SID post.