Category Archives: Displays

Silvaco, Inc., a provider of electronic design automation software and semiconductor IP, today announced that Dr. Jin Jang of Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea, has joined the Technical Advisory Board (TAB). Formed in early 2016, the TAB is chartered with providing guidance to Silvaco management and engineering teams on the direction of the company’s technology roadmap, and additional early insight into future technology challenges and breakthroughs. Dr. Jang, an accomplished researcher in information display development, will help the company expand its technology leadership in advanced TFT and OLED displays.

Dr. Jang serves as the Director of the Advanced Display Research Center at Kyung Hee University in Dongjak-gu, Seoul, Korea. He actively pursues display research, publishing 20 to 30 SCI-level papers each year and conducting joint research projects with researchers in the US and UK as well as sharing his research findings via international conferences and special lectures. He is credited with establishing the world’s first Department of Information Display at a major university, and is the recipient of numerous academic and industry awards including the Academic Award from the Korean Vacuum Society, the IEEE George E. Smith award, and the Sottow Owaki Prize from the Society for Information Display (SID) for outstanding contributions to the education and training of students and professionals in the field of information display. Dr. Jang was named an SID Fellow in 2006. Dr. Jang received a BS in Physics at Seoul National University and his PhD in Physics from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

“I’m pleased to join Silvaco’s technical advisory board at an exciting time of growth and technical development for the company,” said Dr Jang.  “Creating solutions to the important growing challenges in advanced display development requires close collaboration between industry and academic researchers, and I believe working with Silvaco and the advisory board will accelerate this cooperation.”

“We are honored to welcome Dr. Jang to our technology advisory board,” said David L. Dutton, CEO of Silvaco.  “He is a well-known and highly regarded leader in the information display industry. We appreciate him joining our team and look forward to working closely with him to help us continue our technical leadership in the display segment. His immense knowledge will guide us to align our technology direction to meet the future requirements in TFT and OLED display development.”

The Society for Information Display (SID) announced today the designation of a new award to honor the outstanding contributions of young researchers to the advancements of active matrix addressed information displays. The Peter Brody Prize will be awarded to a young researcher under age 40 who has made outstanding contributions in innovating the design and enhancing the performance of active matrix addressed information displays.

The award is named after the late professor Dr. Peter Brody, who was the pioneer of active matrix thin film transistors for information displays.

Dr. Brody demonstrated the world’s-first working CdSe TFT-EL and TFT-LCD panels in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He was the pioneer and great advocate for active matrix addressed information displays. He led a pilot line manufacturing TFT-EL panels at Westinghouse and commercial-scale manufacturing of TFT-LCD panels at Panelvision in 1980. He continued to develop low-cost TFT backplane technologies at Magnascreen and Advantech until the end of his life.

Dr. Brody was an SID Fellow and received the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize from SID in 1987 for his outstanding technical achievement and contribution to information displays. He was also honored with the Rank Prize in optoelectronics (UK), the Eduard Rhein Prize (Germany), the IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Metal and thee NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize.

The Peter Brody Prize will recognize a young researcher, under the age of 40, for major contributions, which enhance the performance of active matrix addressed displays. It is the intention of the prize to recognize young researchers who have made ‘major-impact’ technical contributions to the developments of active matrix addressed displays in one or more of the following areas:

  • thin film transistor devices
  • active matrix addressing techniques
  • active matrix device manufacturing
  • active matrix display media
  • active matrix display-enabling components

Award recipients have to be less than 40 years of age at the time of nomination; and nominees are not required to be a member of SID.

Winners of the Peter Brody Prize will receive a $2,000 stipend, made possible through a generous grant of $40,000 from Dr. Fang-Chen Luo. Dr. Luo worked with Dr. Brody at Westinghouse R&D Center demonstrating the first working TFT-EL panel in 1973 and a TFT-LC panel in 1974. He is donating the money to honor Dr. Brody, who was his mentor, as well as to recognize young engineers for their innovative contributions to active matrix addressed information displays. The grant will be used to endow the award in perpetuity.

The award joins the lineup of prestigious honors bestowed by SID to outstanding innovators in the field of information displays, including the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize for outstanding technical achievement in or contribution to display technology; the Jan Rajchman Prize for outstanding scientific or technical achievement in or contribution to research on flat-panel displays; the Otto Schade Prize for outstanding scientific or technical achievement in or contribution to the advancement of the functional performance and/or image quality of information displays; and, the Slottow-Owaki Prize for outstanding contributions to personnel training in the field of information display.

The deadline for nominations for the 2017 awards is Oct. 15, 2016. For more information on any of the SID Honors and Awards, including how to submit nominations, please visit www.sid.org and click “Awards.”

Today, at the OLEDs World Summit in San Diego, Kateeva, a OLED production equipment developer, reported that its YIELDjet FLEX system has earned a commanding lead in the key organic layer deposition step in the OLED Thin Film Encapsulation (TFE) market. Since the novel inkjet printing solution debuted in manufacturing in 2014, the company has secured the vast majority of available TFE orders. Customers include the world’s largest flat panel display manufacturers located in three key Asia regions.

TFE is a critical step in the flexible OLED manufacturing process. It gives thinness and flexibility to the OLED device, and helps reduce overall manufacturing costs. OLEDs utilizing TFE are revolutionizing the consumer electronics industry by enabling exciting new mobile products that are bendable, foldable and even roll-able. Kateeva’s YIELDjet FLEX system helped catalyze the transition to the new display technology by solving key technical challenges that previously made mass-producing OLEDs with TFE, including flexible OLEDs, economically unviable.

Kateeva CEO Alain Harrus attributed the company’s market momentum to the swift migration to flexible OLED mass production by display leaders. “That fast manufacturing transition speaks to the spirited innovation within the display industry, where leaders are testing the limits of physics, chemistry and engineering ingenuity, and making substantial R&D investments to commercialize revolutionary displays. We’re privileged to partner with these trail-blazing companies, and pleased that our YIELDjet technology is enabling their processes.”

The YIELDjet FLEX tool is the first system to emerge from Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform. The YIELDjet platform is Kateeva’s foundational technology. Introduced in late 2013, it was the first inkjet printing manufacturing equipment platform engineered specifically for OLED mass-production. OLED technology was already transforming rigid smart phone displays with vibrant color and extraordinary image quality. With new high-yield mass-production equipment, OLED technology would enable the next leap—freedom from glass substrates—a breakthrough that would unleash tantalizing new flexible products.

Kateeva’s YIELDjet FLEX system has enabled a rapid transition from glass encapsulation to TFE in new OLED production lines. The company’s precision deposition solution for the TFE organic layer deposition process is fast, offers good planarization, few particle defects, high material utilization, good scalability, and easy maintenance. These advantages deliver dramatically higher TFE yields and lower mass-production costs, making the system a powerful alternative to vacuum evaporation technologies which had reached their technical limits.

Today, barely two years after its debut, Kateeva’s YIELDjet FLEX tool is the undisputed leader in the industry.

At the OLEDs World Summit, Kateeva technologist, Neetu Chopra, Ph.D. will reveal how YIELDjet technology will soon be applied to mass-produce the RGB OLED layer to enable affordable OLED TVs. Dr. Chopra will present her talk today at 4:35pm.

Applied Materials, Inc. today introduced the display industry’s first high-resolution inline e-beam review (EBR) system, increasing the speed at which manufacturers of OLED and UHD LCD screens can achieve optimum yields and bring new display concepts to market.

Applied is the semiconductor industry leader in EBR with more than 70 percent market share in 2015. The company has combined its leading-edge SEM capabilities used in semiconductor device review with a large-scale display vacuum platform, resulting in an inline EBR technology that is the fastest, most effective method to discover and address the root causes of killer defects in advanced mobile and TV displays.

Applied’s EBR system has received orders from 6 of the top 10 largest display manufacturers in the world and demand is increasing as manufacturers look to quickly and cost effectively optimize their yields and bring new types of displays to market faster.

“Our new EBR system is the latest in a strong pipeline of display products that enables customers to solve critical OLED and LCD manufacturing challenges,” said Ali Salehpour, senior vice president and general manager, Display and Adjacent Markets and Applied Global Services, Applied Materials. “Applied’s unique ability to combine semiconductor yield techniques and panel-level SEM technology expands our addressable market and avoids costly yield excursions for our customers. Emerging applications such as augmented and virtual reality and smart vehicles require better displays with new form factors. These applications are driving demand for solutions like our EBR tool that give customers significant time-to-market advantages.”

“As a worldwide leader in display, Tianma values the strong relationship with Applied Materials to help us develop new technologies required to produce the high-quality, high-performance mobile displays that consumers have come to expect,” said Dr. Jun Ma, vice president, Tianma Micro-electronics Co., Ltd. “Applied’s EBR system will enable us to reduce the start-up time at our Wuhan fab and accelerate our ability to bring more advanced display technologies to market. In addition to EBR, we look forward to working with Applied to introduce other semiconductor yield techniques to mobile display manufacturing.”

Advanced display technologies require an increasing number of process steps resulting in more and smaller contaminates, and new types of defects. Current inline automated optical defect inspection tools for displays are not as effective as SEM analysis in distinguishing killer from non-killer defects, or in determining systematic root causes of defects. Prior to the introduction of Applied’s EBR system, conducting SEM analysis on displays required breaking the glass substrate into pieces and examining each piece separately under a microscope. This is not only costly and time consuming but also makes it nearly impossible to determine the location of the defect on the full panel. Applied solves these limitations by providing inline SEM review at the industry’s highest resolution and throughput without requiring the panel to be broken.

Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq:AMAT) is a leader in materials engineering solutions used to produce virtually every new chip and advanced display in the world.

Applied Materials’ display e-beam review (EBR) system

Applied Materials’ display e-beam review (EBR) system

Solid State Technology announced today that its premier semiconductor manufacturing conference and networking event, The ConFab, will be held at the iconic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego on May 14-17, 2017. A 30% increase in attendance in 2016 with a similar uplift expected in 2017, makes the venue an ideal meeting location as The ConFab continues to expand.

    

For more than 12 years, The ConFab, an invitation-only executive conference, has been the destination for key industry influencers and decision-makers to connect and collaborate on critical issues.

“The semiconductor industry is maturing, yet opportunities abound,” said Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief of Solid State Technology and Conference Chair of The ConFab. “The Internet of Things (IoT) is exploding, which will result in a demand for “things” such as sensors and actuators, as well as cloud computing. 5G is also coming and will be the key technology for access to the cloud.”

The ConFab is the best place to seek a deeper understanding on these and other important issues, offering a unique blend of market insights, technology forecasts and strategic assessments of the challenges and opportunities facing semiconductor manufacturers. “In changing times, it’s critical for people to get together in a relaxed setting, learn what’s new, connect with old friends, make new acquaintances and find new business opportunities,” Singer added.

Dave Mount

David Mount

Solid State Technology is also pleased to announce the addition of David J. Mount to The ConFab team as marketing and business development manager. Mount has a rich history in the semiconductor manufacturing equipment business and will be instrumental in guiding continued growth, and expanding into new high growth areas.

Mainstream semiconductor technology will remain the central focus of The ConFab, and the conference will be expanded with additional speakers, panelists, and VIP attendees that will participate from other fast growing and emerging areas. These include biomedical, automotive, IoT, MEMS, LEDs, displays, thin film batteries, photonics and advanced packaging. From both the device maker and the equipment supplier perspective, The ConFab 2017 is a must-attend networking conference for business leaders.

The ConFab conference program is guided by a stellar Advisory Board, with high level representatives from GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Texas Instruments, TSMC, Cisco, Samsung, Intel, Lam Research, KLA-Tencor, ASE, NVIDIA, the Fab Owners Association and elsewhere.

Details on the invitation-only conference are at: www.theconfab.com. For sponsorship inquiries, contact Kerry Hoffman at [email protected]. For details on attending as a guest or qualifying as a VIP, contact Sally Bixby at [email protected].

By Zvi Or-Bach, President & CEO, MonolithIC 3D Inc.

As we have predicted two and a half years back, the industry is bifurcating, and just a few products pursue scaling to 7nm while the majority of designs stay on 28nm or older nodes.

Our March 2014 blog Moore’s Law has stopped at 28nm has recently been re-confirmed. At the time we wrote: “From this point on we will still be able to double the amount of transistors in a single device but not at lower cost. And, for most applications, the cost will actually go up.” This reconfirmation can be found in the following IBS cost analysis table slide, presented at the early Sept FD-SOI event in Shanghai.

Gate costs continue to rise each generation for FinFETs, IBS predicts.

Gate costs continue to rise each generation for FinFETs, IBS predicts.

As reported by EE Times – Chip Process War Heats Up, and quoting Handel Jones of IBS “28nm node is likely to be the biggest process of all through 2025”.

IBS prediction was seconded by “Samsung executive showed a foil saying it believes 28nm will have the lowest cost per transistor of any node.” The following chart was presented by Samsung at the recent SEMICON West (2016).

Zvi 2

And even Intel has given up on its “every two years” but still claims it can keep reducing transistor cost. Yet Intel’s underwhelming successes as a foundry suggests otherwise. We have discussed it in a blog titled Intel — The Litmus Test, and it was essentially repeated by SemiWiki’s Apple will NEVER use Intel Custom Foundry!

This discussion seems academic now, as the actual engineering costs of devices in advanced nodes have shown themselves to be too expensive for much of the industry. Consequently, and as predicted, the industry is bifurcating, with a few products pursuing scaling to 7nm while the majority of designs use 28nm or older nodes.

The following chart derived from TSMC quarterly earnings reports was published last week by Ed Sperling in the blog Stepping Back From Scaling:

Zvi 3

Yes, the 50-year march of Moore’s Law has ended, and the industry is now facing a new reality.

This is good news for innovation, as a diversity of choices helps support new ideas and new technologies such as 3D NAND, FDSOI, MEMS and others. These technologies will enable new markets and products such as the emerging market of IoT.

A good opportunity to learn more about these new scaling technologies is the IEEE S3S ’16, to be held in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, October 10th thru 13th, 2016. It starts with 3D and FDSOI tutorials, the emerging technologies for the IC future. CEA Leti is scheduled to give an update on their CoolCube program, Qualcomm will present some of their work on monolithic 3D, and three leading researchers from an imec, MIT, and Korea university collaboration will present their work on advanced monolithic 3D integration technologies. Many other authors will discuss their work on monolithic 3DIC and its ecosystem, in addition to tracks focused on SOI, sub-VT and dedicated sessions on IoT.

SEMI today announced that twenty-one start-ups have been selected to pitch to investors and exhibit their products at SEMICON Europa‘s INNOVATION VILLAGE in Grenoble, France at the Alpexpo from 25-27 October, 2016. INNOVATION VILLAGE will showcase never-before-seen technologies, with early stage companies introducing their technologies on the exposition floor.

INNOVATION VILLAGE, an area of more than 400m² on the SEMICON Europa exhibition floor, is dedicated to the launch and promotion of technological innovation.  Twenty-one leading European start-ups will be featured, including:

• 3Dis Technologies • HPROB • ProNT GmbH
• Antaios • Irlynx • Silicon Radar
• Applied Nanolayers BV • Madci • Siltectra
• Bright Red Systems Gmbh • Mi2-factory GmbH • Smart Force Technologies
• Fastree3D • Miniswys SA • Smoltek
• FlexEnable • Noivion • Solayl
• FMC – The Ferroelectric Memory Company • Pollen Metrology • Terabee

Start-ups will be given the opportunity to “pitch” their products to potential investors including Applied Ventures LLC, Samsung Ventures, TEL Venture Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, 3M New Ventures, Aliad-Air Liquide Corporate Venture Capital, Capital ASTER, CEA Investment, VTT Ventures, Capital-E, Siemens Technology Accelerator GmbH and more.

For the first time at the INNOVATION VILLAGE, a new technology transfer program, called the TechnoMarket, from partner Linksium, SATT Grenoble Alpes will be showcased on 26 October. “The national network, SATT, has chosen SEMICON Europa to promote the best technological projects derived from public research within France that can also benefit manufacturers. The new Techno Market event offers new opportunities for businesses,” says Gilles Talbotier, CEO, Linksium.  The TechnoMarket acts as a genuine market place for VCs and companies ready to invest in innovation.

Free admission code: Use the promotional code SCEU-TBN4U to gain free admission to the show floor (not including conferences or forums).  Register now – attend to connect.

For more information about SEMICON Europa, please visit http://www.semiconeuropa.org

Nanoelectronics research center imec announces that Kris Myny, one of its young scientists, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The grant of 1.5 million euros is earmarked to open up new research horizons in the field of thin-film transistor technology. This will allow a leap forward compared to current state-of-the-art and enable breakthrough applications in e.g. healthcare and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). ERC Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to support excellent researchers at the stage at which they are starting their own independent research team after a stringent selection procedure; they are among the most prestigious of European research grants.

With his research, Kris Myny wants to realize a breakthrough in thin-film transistor technology, a technology used to create the large-area, flexible circuits that e.g. drive today’s flat-panel displays.

Specifically, he wants to introduce design innovations of unipolar n-type transistor circuits based on amorphous Indium-Gallium-Zinc-Oxide (a-IGZO) as semiconductor. These are currently acknowledged as the most promising transistors for next-generation curved, flexible, or even rollable electronic applications.

Kris Myny said, “My goal is to use these transistors to introduce a new logic family for building digital circuits that will drastically decrease the power consumption compared to current flexible circuits. And this of course without compromising the speed of the electronics. At the same time, we will also make the transistors smaller, in a way that is compatible with large-area manufacturing. In addition, I will also look at new techniques to design ultralow-power systems in the new logic style. These will allow building next-generation large-area flexible applications such as displays, IoT sensors, or wearable healthcare sensor patches.”

In a recent press release, the European Commission announced that in 2017 it would invest a record 1.8 billion in its ERC grant scheme. A sizable part of the budget is earmarked for Starting Grants, reserved for young scientists with two to seven years of post-PhD experience. Jo De Boeck, imec’s CTO says “We congratulate Kris Myny for all his valuable research culminating in this grant. Imec goes to great lengths to select and foster our young scientists and provide them with a world-class infrastructure. These ERC Starting Grants show that their work indeed meets the highest standards, comparable to any in Europe.”

SEMI, a supplier of independent semiconductor market research, today announced SEMI FabView, a mobile-friendly, interactive version of its popular World Fab Forecast quarterly report for electronic supply chain players and analysts. The new product was announced during the press conference at SEMICON Taiwan, where 43,000 industry professionals are convening this week. SEMI FabView tracks spending and capacities of over 1,100 facilities, including over 60 future facilities, across industry segments from Analog, Power, Logic, MPU, Memory, and Foundry to MEMS and LED fabs.

semi fabview

SEMI FabView features high-level fab data such as capacity, technology nodes, and equipment spending, with other device manufacturing insights such as fabs by region, wafer size, product type and construction status. This new online platform enables anytime access on the changes taking place in fab construction and expansion, production volume, device types, and more. The ability to quickly access the latest data for quarterly business reviews or earnings calls, or to validate an investment decision, is a key feature of this new product.

“SEMI FabView, an online platform, provides SEMI members and customers access to the industry benchmark World Fab Forecast database information in an entirely new way,” said Dan Tracy, senior director of SEMI Industry Research & Statistics for SEMI. “By adding the interactive elements of SEMI FabView, subscribers now have on-the-go real-time access to expert analysis that can be implemented in their models or forecasts.”

SEMI FabView users can:

  • view forecast for equipment and construction spending, capacity changes, and fab status from new plans to closures
  • organize data views by filtering data and accessing analyst commentary for each company and fab to see the latest SEMI forecast
  • access forecast data by company, geographical region, wafer size, technology geometry and specific stages of fab life cycle ─ from announced and planned new fabs to fabs that are in transition (e.g., when a cleanroom is converting to a larger wafer size or a different product type)

SEMI FabView is available for a product demo; contact [email protected]. Learn more about SEMI FabView here: www.semi.org/en/semi-fabview

Lomonosov MSU physicists found a way to “force” silicon nanoparticles to glow in response to radiation strongly enough to replace expensive semiconductors used in display business. According to Maxim Shcherbakov, researcher at the Department of Quantum Electronics of the Moscow State University and one of the authors of the study, the developed method considerably enhances the efficiency of nanoparticle photoluminescence.

The key term in the problem is photoluminescence — the process, when materials irradiated by visible or ultraviolet radiation start to respond with their own light, but in a different spectral range. In the study, the material glows red.

In some of the modern displays, semiconductor nanoparticles, or the so-called quantum dots, are used. In quantum dots, electrons behave completely unlike those in the bulk semiconductor, and it has long been known that quantum dots possess excellent luminescent properties. Today, for the purposes of quantum-dot based displays various semiconductors are used, i.e. CdSe, etc. These materials are toxic and expensive, and, therefore, researchers have long been scrutinizing the far cheaper and much more studied silicon. It is also suitable for such use in all respects except one — silicon nanoparticles vaguely respond to radiation, which is not appealing for optoelectronic industry.

Scientists all over the world were seeking to solve this problem since the beginning of the 1990’s, but until now no significant success has been achieved in this direction. The breakthrough idea about how to “tame” silicon originated in Sweden, at the Royal Institute of Technology, Kista. A post-doctoral researcher Sergey Dyakov (a graduate of the MSU Faculty of Physics and the first author of the paper) suggested placing an array of silicon nanoparticles in a matrix with a non-homogeneous dielectric medium and cover it with golden nanostripes.

‘The heterogeneity of the environment, as has been previously shown in other experiments, allows to increase the photoluminescence of silicon by several orders of magnitude due to the so-called quantum confinement,’ says Maxim Shcherbakov. ‘However, the efficiency of the light interaction with nanocrystals still remains insufficient. It has been proposed to enhance the efficiency by using plasmons (quasiparticle appearing from fluctuations of the electron gas in metals — ed). Plasmon lattice formed by golden nanostripes allow to “hold” light on the nanoscale, and allow a more effective interaction with nanoparticles located nearby, bringing its luminescence to an increase.’

The MSU experiments with samples of “gold-plated” matrix with silicon nanoparticles made in Sweden brilliantly confirmed the theoretical predictions – the UV irradiated silicon for the first time shone bright enough to be used it in practice.

The first author of the paper Sergey Dyakov will present the findings on The 10th International Congress on Advanced Electromagnetic Materials in Microwaves and Optics (September 17-22, Crete). The work was also published in the Physical Review B (“Optical properties of silicon nanocrystals covered by periodic array of gold nanowires”).