Category Archives: Displays

Orbotech Ltd., a provider of process innovation technologies, solutions and equipment that are enabling the transformation of the global electronics manufacturing industry, announced today that Tianma Micro-electronics Co. Ltd. (“Tianma”), a producer of display solutions with over three decades of experience in the Flat Panel Display (FPD) field, has selected Orbotech’s ArrayChecker and Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) solutions for its production line upgrade to flexible AMOLED technology.

Tianma has invested approximately $1.8 billion to extend its Gen 6 AMOLED fab in Wuhan, China. The Wuhan fab is designed for the production of flexible AMOLED display panels which are rapidly gaining popularity in consumer electronics devices.  When the new line ramps up to mass production during the second half of 2017, Tianma expects to achieve capacity of 30,000 panels per month, with an additional 30,000 per month capacity increase in 2018.

According to the IHS Display Long-Term Demand Forecast Tracker Q4 2016, “AMOLED’s share of overall FPD revenue will increase to almost 30% in 2023. Revenue from AMOLED displays is expected to grow from $15 billion in 2016 to $36 billion in 2023 for a CAGR of 17%.”

“We are delighted that Tianma has selected our solutions for their flex AMOLED fabrication line,” stated Mr. Edu Meytal, President of Orbotech Pacific Display.  “These solutions, which were designed to enable the new manufacturing processes required to produce flex AMOLED displays, will enable our customers to produce the most advanced FPD products available with high yields.  This deal builds upon past successful implementations of Orbotech’s inspection, testing and repair solutions.”

Global liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel shipments are expected to increase by 7 percent in the second quarter of 2017 quarter to quarter to 646.7 million units, a rebound from a 9 percent quarter-to-quarter decrease in the first quarter, according to IHS Markit.

“The increase in shipments has been driven by demand from new product model preparation and the annual Labour Day sales promotion in China held during May,” said Linda Lin, senior analyst of display research at IHS Markit. “Among applications, TV, monitor and smartphone panels will drive the shipment increase.”

IT panel demand is expected to be conservative this year, without strong enough replacement momentum to drive it up. Demand for notebook PC panels is forecast to decline 8 percent in the second quarter of 2017 from the previous quarter, weaker than that for monitors (up 5 percent) and tablet PC (down 1 percent) applications. In particular, tablet PC panel demand is expected to surge at the end of the second quarter as Apple and other tablet PC brands launch new products later.TV panel inventory level is balanced at this moment, and TV panel demand is expected to go smoothly through the second quarter of 2017. “TV inventory levels after China’s Labour Day sales promotions will determine whether panel demand can continue up or decline in the second half of 2017,” Lin said.Demand for TV panels is forecast to be up 3 percent in the second quarter from the previous quarter. After suffering from high panel prices, TV brands are likely to move their procurement plan to two different size segments at either 32-inch and below, or 65-inch and above.  Smaller TV brands are aiming for the smaller segment, seen as a boon for quantity sales given the lower retail price, while first-tier brands that command better purchasing power will look to the larger segment, despite the supply shortage caused by tighter capacity, according to IHS Markit.

“Panel makers are moving more capacity to IT panels from smartphone panels beginning the second quarter as mobile phone set demand slows down. This will aggravate the supply-demand imbalance in the IT panel market,” Lin said.

As electronics become increasingly pervasive in our lives – from smart phones to wearable sensors – so too does the ever rising amount of electronic waste they create. A United Nations Environment Program report found that almost 50 million tons of electronic waste were thrown out in 2017–more than 20 percent higher than waste in 2015.

Troubled by this mounting waste, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team are rethinking electronics. “In my group, we have been trying to mimic the function of human skin to think about how to develop future electronic devices,” Bao said. She described how skin is stretchable, self-healable and also biodegradable – an attractive list of characteristics for electronics. “We have achieved the first two [flexible and self-healing], so the biodegradability was something we wanted to tackle.”

The team created a flexible electronic device that can easily degrade just by adding a weak acid like vinegar. The results were published May 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

“This is the first example of a semiconductive polymer that can decompose,” said lead author Ting Lei, a postdoctoral fellow working with Bao.

In addition to the polymer – essentially a flexible, conductive plastic – the team developed a degradable electronic circuit and a new biodegradable substrate material for mounting the electrical components. This substrate supports the electrical components, flexing and molding to rough and smooth surfaces alike. When the electronic device is no longer needed, the whole thing can biodegrade into nontoxic components.

Biodegradable bits

Bao, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, had previously created a stretchable electrode modeled on human skin. That material could bend and twist in a way that could allow it to interface with the skin or brain, but it couldn’t degrade. That limited its application for implantable devices and – important to Bao – contributed to waste.

Bao said that creating a robust material that is both a good electrical conductor and biodegradable was a challenge, considering traditional polymer chemistry. “We have been trying to think how we can achieve both great electronic property but also have the biodegradability,” Bao said.

Eventually, the team found that by tweaking the chemical structure of the flexible material it would break apart under mild stressors. “We came up with an idea of making these molecules using a special type of chemical linkage that can retain the ability for the electron to smoothly transport along the molecule,” Bao said. “But also this chemical bond is sensitive to weak acid – even weaker than pure vinegar.” The result was a material that could carry an electronic signal but break down without requiring extreme measures.

In addition to the biodegradable polymer, the team developed a new type of electrical component and a substrate material that attaches to the entire electronic component. Electronic components are usually made of gold. But for this device, the researchers crafted components from iron. Bao noted that iron is a very environmentally friendly product and is nontoxic to humans.

The researchers created the substrate, which carries the electronic circuit and the polymer, from cellulose. Cellulose is the same substance that makes up paper. But unlike paper, the team altered cellulose fibers so the “paper” is transparent and flexible, while still breaking down easily. The thin film substrate allows the electronics to be worn on the skin or even implanted inside the body.

From implants to plants

The combination of a biodegradable conductive polymer and substrate makes the electronic device useful in a plethora of settings – from wearable electronics to large-scale environmental surveys with sensor dusts.

“We envision these soft patches that are very thin and conformable to the skin that can measure blood pressure, glucose value, sweat content,” Bao said. A person could wear a specifically designed patch for a day or week, then download the data. According to Bao, this short-term use of disposable electronics seems a perfect fit for a degradable, flexible design.

And it’s not just for skin surveys: the biodegradable substrate, polymers and iron electrodes make the entire component compatible with insertion into the human body. The polymer breaks down to product concentrations much lower than the published acceptable levels found in drinking water. Although the polymer was found to be biocompatible, Bao said that more studies would need to be done before implants are a regular occurrence.

Biodegradable electronics have the potential to go far beyond collecting heart disease and glucose data. These components could be used in places where surveys cover large areas in remote locations. Lei described a research scenario where biodegradable electronics are dropped by airplane over a forest to survey the landscape. “It’s a very large area and very hard for people to spread the sensors,” he said. “Also, if you spread the sensors, it’s very hard to gather them back. You don’t want to contaminate the environment so we need something that can be decomposed.” Instead of plastic littering the forest floor, the sensors would biodegrade away.

As the number of electronics increase, biodegradability will become more important. Lei is excited by their advancements and wants to keep improving performance of biodegradable electronics. “We currently have computers and cell phones and we generate millions and billions of cell phones, and it’s hard to decompose,” he said. “We hope we can develop some materials that can be decomposed so there is less waste.”

Entegris, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENTG), a provider of specialty chemicals and advanced materials solutions for the microelectronics industry, announced today that it acquired W. L. Gore & Associates’ water and chemical filtration product line for microelectronics applications in an asset purchase for approximately $20 million. Entegris expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings beginning in 2017.

Todd Edlund, Chief Operating Officer of Entegris, said: “We are excited to add these market-leading filtration solutions to our existing offerings for the microfiltration of high-purity water and bulk chemicals used in semiconductor, OLED and flat panel display manufacturing applications. The acquisition of these products complements our portfolio of advanced liquid filtration solutions. It also reflects our strategy to grow our served markets through the deployment of capital for strategic accretive acquisitions that augment our internal development initiatives.”

The new Samsung Galaxy S8 equipped with 64 gigabytes (GB) of NAND flash memory carries a bill of materials (BOM) cost that comes out to US$301.60, much higher than for previous versions of the company’s smartphones, according to a preliminary estimate from IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).

After $5.90 in basic manufacturing costs are added, Samsung’s total cost to make the Galaxy S8 rises to $307.50; the unsubsidized price for a 64GB Galaxy S8 starts at around $720. The preliminary estimated total at this point is $43.34 higher than that of the Galaxy S7 previously performed by IHS Markit, and is $36.29 higher than the total build cost of the Galaxy S7 Edge, considered a better comparison to the Galaxy S8. IHS Markit has not yet performed a teardown analysis on the larger Galaxy S8 Plus.

“The higher total BOM costs for the Galaxy S8 seem to be part of a trend that reflects something of an arms race in features among Apple, Samsung and other phone manufacturers, as they all try to add new and distinguishing hardware features,” said Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of cost benchmarking services for IHS Markit. “While there are new non-hardware features in the Galaxy S8, such as a virtual assistant called Bixby, from a teardown perspective the hardware in the Galaxy S8 and that of the forthcoming new iPhone is expected to be very similar.”

The introduction of the Galaxy S8 comes at a delicate time for the embattled South Korean electronics giant, which is eager to put behind the challenges associated with the Galaxy Note 7, whose exploding batteries prompted a worldwide recall.

The latest salvo from Samsung shows how it’s keen to regain consumer confidence and attain leadership in the smartphone landscape, a nearly saturated but still highly competitive space that remains key to retaining subscriber loyalties and winning new converts.

First smartphone capable of gigabit-LTE speeds

Both the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus feature a 10-nanometer (nm) system-on-chip (SoC) along with CAT-16 LTE modem and radio. The CDMA version of the S8, intended for use in the United States as well as in China, will feature the Snapdragon 835 chipset from San Diego-based Qualcomm. In comparison, a version of the phone featuring Samsung’s homegrown Exynos 8895 chipset will be used for the rest of the world.

The CAT-16 LTE radio allows the new Galaxy phone to aggregate three carriers of up to 20 megahertz each. Combined with 4×4 MIMO antennas and higher-order modulation of 256 QAM, the LTE modem is capable of reaching peak theoretical speeds of one gigabit per second. “Gigabit LTE is very much the marquee specification for 2017 flagship smartphones,” said Wayne Lam, principal analyst of smartphone electronics, IHS Markit. “Keep in mind that gigabit speeds are a best-case scenario and that a user’s real-world experience will be limited to what mobile networks can provide.”

New “Infinity Display” design fits better in hand

The redesigned Galaxy S8 has a tall, narrow shape that is 1.5 millimeters narrower than the previous Galaxy S7, providing slick new ergonomics while also optimizing screen real estate. The screen curves around the edges, and Samsung designers have maximized the display, relative to the size of the phone, with a 5.8-inch 2960×1440 AMOLED display and an elongated aspect ratio of 18.5:9. Compared to conventional 16:9 aspect-ratio Quad HD smartphone displays, the Galaxy S8 features an additional 15 percent more pixels in a form factor that is easier to hold in the hand. The device’s haptic engine, which provides the “click” feel for users, also has been improved for longer-duty cycles and a more dynamic response.

Double the base-model storage

Both the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus feature 4GB of RAM and built-in storage of 64GB—twice the standard built-in storage found in the Galaxy S7 as well as the iPhone 7. Storage for the new Samsung phones can also be expanded, up to 256GB, via a microSD card. The Samsung NAND flash memory and DRAM on the S8 come in at a cost of $41.50. Rassweiler said: “While in previous years the cost per gigabyte has generally fallen in both the NAND flash and DRAM areas, we have seen rising prices in both DRAM and NAND flash recently due to some tightness in the marketplace. The cost of memory in the S8 reflects these recent market dynamics, even though we expect the erosion in memory pricing—something that occurs regularly in the memory market—to resume during the course of the year.”

Battery

The battery capacity on the Galaxy S8, at 3000 milliamp hour (mAh), is the same as that found in last year’s Galaxy S7. However, compared to the Galaxy S7 Edge, which had a 3600mAh battery, Samsung played it safe after the Note 7 incident and included a considerably less dense battery pack. Overall cost estimate for the Galaxy S8 battery pack is $4.50.

Single camera lens

Although the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus come with new features and the latest components, each still has only a single camera in the back—essentially the same as the camera module found in last year’s Galaxy S7. Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, the newly launched LG G6 and many Chinese OEMs are now promoting dual cameras as a key feature. Owing to the asymmetric placement of the rear fingerprint sensor, it would have been likely that a dual-camera design was scrapped at the last minute in the design cycle.

Today, SEMI announced that SEMICON Southeast Asia 2017 (SEMICON SEA 2017) is reporting an increase of up to 30 percent in attendees this year. Over 7,500 visitors and exhibitors are expected from 25 to 27 April at the event, which is the region’s premier exposition for connecting the electronics manufacturing supply chain. SEMICON SEA was officially launched today by YBhg Dato’ Sri Mustapa Mohamed, minister of International Trade and Industry, together with YAB Lim Guan Eng, chief minister of Penang, at the Subterranean Penang International Convention and Exhibition Centre (SPICE).  Guests-of-honour presiding at the opening ceremony included YBhg Dato’ Peter Halm, president of the Semiconductor Fabrication Association of Malaysia (SFAM) and Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI.

Key industry leaders will share their insights on technology innovation including the Internet of Things (IoT) that will bring significant transformation to the manufacturing sector, and examine the revolution of Disruptive Technology that has opened up new market opportunities. SEMICON SEA 2017 will showcase the trends, technologies and opportunities driving smart manufacturing in the electronics markets. In addition, SEMICON SEA 2017 will feature new activities:

  • Future Electronics Manufacturing Pavilion: featuring developments that can offer integration and add value to the manufacturing operations and supply chain
  • Failure Analysis Pavilion: showcasing solutions that can help companies maximise production while improving yield and reliability
  • World of IoT: Futura-X: featuring technologies and applications that are fuelling new markets for electronics and connecting the world

Ng Kai Fai, president of SEMI Southeast Asia, said the rise in participation this year demonstrates the importance that the manufacturing industry places on keeping well-informed of the advancements taking place. Ng expects Malaysia to have continued growth in 2017 following the strengthening global macroeconomics and growing demand for semiconductor technology in devices.  “Our industry participants see exceptional value in SEMICON Southeast Asia, learning about advances in the industry and how to automate and contribute to efficiency within their manufacturing processes. We are also seeing an increase in cross-border collaborations within this sector. The show facilitates these alliances by offering a complete platform for engaging customers, suppliers, engineers and decision-makers from across the industry, including buyers from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.”

Sponsors for SEMICON SEA 2017 include 3M, Advantest, Air Products, AMEC, Applied Materials, ASE Group, Edwards, Evatec Process Systems, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Hermes Epitek, Kulicke & Soffa, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, Merck, Mentor Graphics, NTT Data, Rudolph Technologies, SAS, Screen, SPTS, TEL, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Tibco, Toray, Xcerra, and Zeiss. Partners for the exposition include AEIS, INTI College Penang, investPenang, Malaysia Convention and Exhibition Bureau, MATRADE, Ministry of Tourism and Culture Malaysia, MIDA, Malaysia Truly Asia, Penang Tourism, Singapore Manufacturing Federation, Samenta, Touch Display Research, VLSI Consultancy, and Yole Développement.

For more information on SEMICON Southeast Asia, please visit www.semiconsea.org

Physicists at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech have discovered the first three-dimensional quantum liquid crystal — a new state of matter that may have applications in ultrafast quantum computers of the future.

These images show light patterns generated by a rhenium-based crystal using a laser method called optical second-harmonic rotational anisotropy. At left, the pattern comes from the atomic lattice of the crystal. At right, the crystal has become a 3-D quantum liquid crystal, showing a drastic departure from the pattern due to the atomic lattice alone. Credit: Hsieh Lab/Caltech

These images show light patterns generated by a rhenium-based crystal using a laser method called optical second-harmonic rotational anisotropy. At left, the pattern comes from the atomic lattice of the crystal. At right, the crystal has become a 3-D quantum liquid crystal, showing a drastic departure from the pattern due to the atomic lattice alone. Credit: Hsieh Lab/Caltech

“We have detected the existence of a fundamentally new state of matter that can be regarded as a quantum analog of a liquid crystal,” says Caltech assistant professor of physics David Hsieh, principal investigator on a new study describing the findings in the April 21 issue of Science. “There are numerous classes of such quantum liquid crystals that can, in principle, exist; therefore, our finding is likely the tip of an iceberg.”

Liquid crystals fall somewhere in between a liquid and a solid: they are made up of molecules that flow around freely as if they were a liquid but are all oriented in the same direction, as in a solid. Liquid crystals can be found in nature, such as in biological cell membranes. Alternatively, they can be made artificially — such as those found in the liquid crystal displays commonly used in watches, smartphones, televisions, and other items that have display screens.

In a “quantum” liquid crystal, electrons behave like the molecules in classical liquid crystals. That is, the electrons move around freely yet have a preferred direction of flow. The first-ever quantum liquid crystal was discovered in 1999 by Caltech’s Jim Eisenstein, the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics and Applied Physics. Eisenstein’s quantum liquid crystal was two-dimensional, meaning that it was confined to a single plane inside the host material — an artificially grown gallium-arsenide-based metal. Such 2-D quantum liquid crystals have since been found in several more materials including high-temperature superconductors — materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance at around -150 degrees Celsius, which is warmer than operating temperatures for traditional superconductors.

John Harter, a postdoctoral scholar in the Hsieh lab and lead author of the new study, explains that 2-D quantum liquid crystals behave in strange ways. “Electrons living in this flatland collectively decide to flow preferentially along the x-axis rather than the y-axis even though there’s nothing to distinguish one direction from the other,” he says.

Now Harter, Hsieh, and their colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee have discovered the first 3-D quantum liquid crystal. Compared to a 2-D quantum liquid crystal, the 3-D version is even more bizarre. Here, the electrons not only make a distinction between the x, y, and z axes, but they also have different magnetic properties depending on whether they flow forward or backward on a given axis.

“Running an electrical current through these materials transforms them from nonmagnets into magnets, which is highly unusual,” says Hsieh. “What’s more, in every direction that you can flow current, the magnetic strength and magnetic orientation changes. Physicists say that the electrons ‘break the symmetry’ of the lattice.”

Harter actually hit upon the discovery serendipitously. He was originally interested in studying the atomic structure of a metal compound based on the element rhenium. In particular, he was trying to characterize the structure of the crystal’s atomic lattice using a technique called optical second-harmonic rotational anisotropy. In these experiments, laser light is fired at a material, and light with twice the frequency is reflected back out. The pattern of emitted light contains information about the symmetry of the crystal. The patterns measured from the rhenium-based metal were very strange–and could not be explained by the known atomic structure of the compound.

“At first, we didn’t know what was going on,” Harter says. The researchers then learned about the concept of 3-D quantum liquid crystals, developed by Liang Fu, a physics professor at MIT. “It explained the patterns perfectly. Everything suddenly made sense,” Harter says.

The researchers say that 3-D quantum liquid crystals could play a role in a field called spintronics, in which the direction that electrons spin may be exploited to create more efficient computer chips. The discovery could also help with some of the challenges of building a quantum computer, which seeks to take advantage of the quantum nature of particles to make even faster calculations, such as those needed to decrypt codes. One of the difficulties in building such a computer is that quantum properties are extremely fragile and can easily be destroyed through interactions with their surrounding environment. A technique called topological quantum computing–developed by Caltech’s Alexei Kitaev, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics–can solve this problem with the help of a special kind of superconductor dubbed a topological superconductor.

“In the same way that 2-D quantum liquid crystals have been proposed to be a precursor to high-temperature superconductors, 3-D quantum liquid crystals could be the precursors to the topological superconductors we’ve been looking for,” says Hsieh.

“Rather than rely on serendipity to find topological superconductors, we may now have a route to rationally creating them using 3-D quantum liquid crystals” says Harter. “That is next on our agenda.”

The ConFab preview


April 1, 2017

BY PETE SINGER, Editor-in-Chief

The agenda is set for The ConFab, to be held May 14-17, 2017 in San Diego at the iconic Hotel del Coronado. While reviewing the abstracts for just the Monday morning session, it struck me how well our speakers will cover the complex opportunities and challenges facing the semiconductor industry.

In the opening keynote, for example, Hans Stork, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, ON Semiconductor we will discuss the challenge to realize high signal to noise ratio in small (read inexpensive) and efficient form factors, using examples of image sensors and power conversion in automotive applications. “It seems that at last, after many decades of exponential progress in logic and memory technologies, the “real world” devices of power handling and sensor functions are jointly enabling another wave of electronics progress in autonomously operating and interacting Things,” he said.

Next, Subramani Kengeri, Vice President of CMOS Platforms Business Unit, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, will describe how the rapid growth of applications in the consumer, auto and mobile space coupled with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for differentiated design and technology solutions. “While die-cost scaling is slowing down and power density is emerging as a major challenge, fabless semiconductor companies are hungry for innovation using application optimized technology solutions. Specifically, emerging SoC innovations are driving the need for low-power, performance, cost, and time-to-volume that solves the issues of voltage scaling and integration of “user-experience” functions,” he notes.

Islam Salama, a Director with Intel Corporation responsible for packaging substrate Pathfinding of the high-density interconnect across all Intel products, looks at it from a connectivity perspective. “The pervasive nature of computing drives a need for connecting billions of people and tens of billions of devices/things via cloud computing. Such connectivity effect will generate tremendous amounts of data and would require a revolutionary change in the technology infrastructures being used to transmit, store and analyze data,” he said.

Next-generation electronics will require several new packaging solutions, he adds. Smaller form factors, lower power consumption, flexible designs, increased memory performance, and-more than ever, a closely managed silicon package, co-optimization and architectural innovations. Heterogeneous integration through package with technologies such as system in package (SIP), on package integration (OPI) and fan-out (WLFO and PLFO) are poised to change the packaging industry and play a disruptive role in enabling next generation devices.

Heterogeneous Integration is also the focus of a talk by Bill Bottoms, Chairman and CEO, Third Millennium Test Solutions. Bill will report on the collaboration in the making of the HIR Roadmap to address disruptive changes in the global IT network, the explosive growth coming for IoT sensors and the multi-sensor fusion and data analytics that extract “awareness” from the expanding data.

I’m very much looking forward to these and many other talks this year, and the exciting panel discussions and networking events we have planned.

An innovative new technique to produce the quickest, smallest, highest-capacity memories for flexible and transparent applications could pave the way for a future golden age of electronics.

Engineering experts from the University of Exeter have developed innovative new memory using a hybrid of graphene oxide and titanium oxide. Their devices are low cost and eco-friendly to produce, are also perfectly suited for use in flexible electronic devices such as ‘bendable’ mobile phone, computer and television screens, and even ‘intelligent’ clothing.

Crucially, these devices may also have the potential to offer a cheaper and more adaptable alternative to ‘flash memory’, which is currently used in many common devices such as memory cards, graphics cards and USB computer drives.

The research team insist that these innovative new devices have the potential to revolutionise not only how data is stored, but also take flexible electronics to a new age in terms of speed, efficiency and power.

The research is published in the leading scientific journal ACS Nano.

Professor David Wright, an Electronic Engineering expert from the University of Exeter and lead author of the paper said: “Using graphene oxide to produce memory devices has been reported before, but they were typically very large, slow, and aimed at the ‘cheap and cheerful’ end of the electronics goods market.

“Our hybrid graphene oxide-titanium oxide memory is, in contrast, just 50 nanometres long and 8 nanometres thick and can be written to and read from in less than five nanoseconds — with one nanometre being one billionth of a metre and one nanosecond a billionth of a second.”

Professor Craciun, a co-author of the work, added: “Being able to improve data storage is the backbone of tomorrow’s knowledge economy, as well as industry on a global scale. Our work offers the opportunity to completely transform graphene-oxide memory technology, and the potential and possibilities it offers.”

As demand for the flexible AMOLED display continues to sharply increase, its revenues are expected to reach $3.2 billion in the third quarter of 2017, exceeding that of rigid AMOLED panels at $3.0 billion, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).

With many smartphone brands planning to apply flexible AMOLED displays to their high-end product lines, revenues for flexible AMOLED panels are expected to grow over 150 percent compared to 2016. On the other hand, rigid AMOLED panels, now mainly used for mid-range smartphones, are forecast to decline 2 percent in revenues from 2016.

“Smartphone brands believe using flexible AMOLED panels in their latest high-end products will differentiate themselves from competitors still using rigid AMOLED displays or liquid crystal displays,” said Jerry Kang, principal analyst of display research at IHS Markit.

“Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have launched some of their flagship smartphones with flexible AMOLED displays since 2013, but have yet to become mainstream products given there was limited panel supply,” Kang said. “Since 2016, however, many more panel makers have focused their efforts on increasing their supply capacity for flexible AMOLED displays. They have also tried to optimize the manufacturing process and design better structure of these panels, making flexible AMOLED display a favored choice for smartphones makers.”

amoled shipments

According to AMOLED & Flexible Display Intelligence Service by IHS Markit, most smartphone makers are aiming to apply flexible AMOLED displays to their products in 2017, but some of them would still find it difficult due to the higher price tag.

“Currently, the cost to make flexible AMOLED panels is much higher than that of rigid AMOLED, but it is possible that costs will fall below that of rigid panels in the future as manufacturing yield rates improve,” Kang said.