Category Archives: FPDs and TFTs

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.”

Super cement’s secret


August 30, 2016

Simple cements are everywhere in construction, but researchers want to create novel construction materials to build smarter infrastructure. The cement known as mayenite is one smart material — it can be turned from an insulator to a transparent conductor and back. Other unique properties of this material make it suitable for industrial production of chemicals such as ammonia and for use as semiconductors in flat panel displays.

The secret behind mayenite’s magic is a tiny change in its chemical composition, but researchers hadn’t been sure why the change had such a big effect on the material, also known as C12A7. In new work, researchers show how C12A7 components called electron anions help to transform crystalline C12A7 into semiconducting glass.

The study, published Aug. 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses computer modeling that zooms in at the electron level along with lab experiments. They showed how the small change in composition results in dramatic changes of the glass properties and, potentially, allows for greater control of the glass formation process.

“We want to get rid of the indium and gallium currently used in most flat panel displays,” said materials scientist Peter Sushko of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This research is leading us toward replacing them with abundant non-toxic elements such as calcium and aluminum.”

Breaking the glass ceiling

More than a decade ago, materials scientist Hideo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and colleagues plucked an oxygen atom from a crystal of C12A7 oxide, which turned the transparent insulating material into a transparent conductor. This switch is rare because the conducting material is transparent: Most conductors are not transparent (think metals) and most transparent materials are not conductive (think window glass).

Back in the crystal, C12A7 oxide’s departing oxygen leaves behind a couple electrons and creates a material known as an electride. This electride is remarkably stable in air, water, and ambient temperatures. Most electrides fall apart in these conditions. Because of this stability, materials scientists want to harness the structure and properties of C12A7 electride. Unfortunately, its crystalline nature is not suitable for large-scale industrial processes, so they needed to make a glass equivalent of C12A7 electride.

And several years ago, they did. Hosono and colleagues converted crystalline C12A7 electride into glass. The glass shares many properties of the crystalline electride, including the remarkable stability.

Crystals are neat and tidy, like apples and oranges arranged orderly in a box, but glasses are unordered and messy, like that same fruit in a plastic grocery bag. Researchers make glass by melting a crystal and cooling the liquid in such a way that the ordered crystal doesn’t reform. With C12A7, the electride forms a glass at a temperature about 200 degrees lower than the oxide does.

This temperature — when the atoms stop flowing as a liquid and freeze in place — is known as the glass transition temperature. Controlling the glass transition temperature allows researchers to control certain properties of the material. For example, how car tires wear down and perform in bad weather depends on the glass transition temperature of the rubber they’re made from.

Sushko, his PNNL colleague Lewis Johnson, Hosono and others at Tokyo Tech wanted to determine why the electride’s glass transition temperature was so much lower than the oxide’s. They suspected components of the electride known as electron anions were responsible. Electron anions are essentially freely moving electrons in place of the much-larger negatively charged oxygen atoms that urge the oxide to form a tidy crystal.

Moveable feat

The team simulated Hosono’s lab experiments using molecular dynamics software that could capture the movement of both the atoms and the electron anions in both the melted material and glass. The team found that that the negatively-charged electron anions paired up between positively charged aluminum or calcium atoms, replacing the negatively charged oxygen atoms that would typically be found between the metals.

The bonds that the electron anions formed between the metal atoms were weaker than bonds between metal and oxygen atoms. These weak links could also move rapidly through the material. This movement allowed a small number of electron anions to have a greater effect on the glass transition temperature than much larger quantities of minerals typically used as additives in glasses.

To rule out other factors as the impetus for the lower transition temperature — such as the electrical charge or change in oxygen atoms — the researchers simulated a material with the same composition as the C12A7 electride but with the electrons spread evenly through the material instead of packed in as electron anions. In this simulation, the glass transition temperature was no different than C12A7 oxide’s. This result confirmed that the network of weak links formed by the electron anions was responsible for changes to the glass transition temperature.

According to the scientists, electron anions form a new type of weak link that can affect the conditions under which a material can form a glass. They join the ranks of typical additives that disrupt the ability of the material to form long chains of atoms, such as fluoride, or form weak, randomly oriented bonds between atoms of opposite charge, such as sodium. The work suggests researchers might be able to control the transition temperature by changing the amount of electron anions they use.

“This work shows us not just how a glass forms,” said PNNL’s Johnson, “but also gives us a new tool for how to control it.”

Unique optical features of quantum dots make them an attractive tool for many applications, from cutting-edge displays to medical imaging. Physical, chemical or biological properties of quantum dots must, however, be adapted to the desired needs. Unfortunately, up to now quantum dots prepared by chemical methods could be functionalized using copper-based click reactions with retention of their luminescence. This obstacle can be ascribed to the fact that copper ions destroy the ability of quantum dots to emit light. Scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw and the Faculty of Chemistry of the Warsaw University of Technology (FC WUT) have shown, however, that zinc oxide (ZnO) quantum dots prepared by an original method developed by them, after modification by the click reaction with the participation of copper ions, fully retain their ability to emit light.

“Click reactions catalyzed by copper cations have long attracted the attention of chemists dealing with quantum dots. The experimental results, however, were disappointing: after modification, the luminescence was so poor that they were just not fit for use. We were the first to demonstrate that it is possible to produce quantum dots from organometallic precursors in a way they do not lose their valuable optical properties after being subjected to copper-catalysed click reactions,” says Prof. Janusz Lewinski (IPC PAS, FC WUT).

Quantum dots are crystalline structures with size of a few nanometers (billionth parts of a meter). As semiconductor materials, they exhibit a variety of interesting features typical of quantum objects, including absorbing and emitting radiation of only a strictly defined energy. Since atoms interact with light in a similar way, quantum dots are often called artificial atoms. In some respects, however, quantum dots offer more possibilities than atoms. Optical properties of each dot actually depend on its size and the type of material from which it is formed. This means that quantum dots may be precisely designed for specific applications.

To meet the need of specific applications, quantum dots have to be tailored in terms of physico-chemical properties. For this purpose, chemical molecules with suitable characteristics are attached to their surface. Due to the simplicity, efficacy, and speed of the process, an exceptionally convenient method is the click reaction. Unfortunately, one of the most widely used click reactions takes place with the participation of copper ions, which was reported to result in the almost complete quenching of the luminescence of the quantum dots.

“Failure is usually a result of the inadequate quality of quantum dots, which is determined by the synthesis method. Currently, ZnO dots are mainly produced by the sol-gel method from inorganic precursors. Quantum dots generated in this manner are coated with a heterogeneous and probably leaky protective shell, made of various sorts of chemical molecules. During a click reaction, the copper ions are in direct contact with the surface of quantum dots and quench the luminescence of the dot, which becomes completely useless,” explains Dr. Agnieszka Grala (IPC PAS), the first author of the article in the Chemical Communications journal.

For several years, Prof. Lewinski’s team has been developing alternative methods for the preparation of high quality ZnO quantum dots. The method presented in this paper affords the quantum dots derived from organozinc precursors. Composition of the nanoparticles can be programmed at the stage of precursors preparation, which makes it possible to precisely control the character of their organic-inorganic interface.

“Nanoparticles produced by our method are crystalline and all have almost the same size. They are spherical and have characteristics of typical quantum dots. Every nanoparticle is stabilized by an impermeable protective jacket, built of organic compounds, strongly anchored on the surface of the semiconductor core. As a result, our quantum dots remain stable for a long time and do not aggregate, that is clump together, in solutions,” describes Malgorzata Wolska-Pietkiewicz, a PhD student at FC WUT.

“The key to success is producing a uniform stabilizing shell. Such coatings are characteristic of the ZnO quantum dots obtained by our method. The organic layer behaves as a tight protective umbrella protecting dots from direct influence of the copper ions,” says Dr. Grala and clarifies: “We carried out click reaction known as alkyne-azide cycloaddition, in which we used a copper(l) compound as catalysts. After functionalization, our quantum dots shone as brightly as at the beginning.”

Quantum dots keep finding more and more applications in various industrial processes and as nanomarkers in, among others, biology and medicine, where they are combined with biologically active molecules. Nanoobjects functionalized in this manner are used to label both individual cells as well as whole tissues. The unique properties of quantum dots also enable long-term monitoring of the labelled item. Commonly used quantum dots, however, contain toxic heavy metals, including cadmium. In addition, they clump together in solutions, which supports the thesis of the lack of tightness of their shells. Meanwhile, the ZnO dots produced by Prof. Lewinski’s group are non-toxic, they do not aggregate, and can be bound to many chemical compounds – so they are much more suitable for medical diagnosis and for imaging cells and tissues.

Research on the methods of production of functionalized ZnO quantum dots was carried out under an OPUS grant from the Poland’s National Science Centre.

Because of seasonally very weak demand and the ramping of new capacity in China, flat-panel display (FPD) supply exceeded demand by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2016, the largest glut since early 2012. The market began to rapidly correct itself in the second quarter and is now trending toward surprising tightness in the second half of 2016. Supply is expected to tighten still further in 2017, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).

flat panel display correction

Rapidly falling panel prices late last year and early this year have encouraged consumers to buy larger TVs. At the same time, notebook and monitor demand has started to stabilize. Finally, capacity growth is restricted, as manufacturers adopt new and more complicated processes in some factories, and more importantly close less productive facilities.

“South Korean panel makers are being particularly aggressive in shutting down older LCD fabs, including Gen 5 and even Gen 7 facilities,” said Charles Annis, senior director at IHS Markit. “The South Korean Gen 7 facility expected to be taken off-line late this year accounts for approximately nearly 4 percent of capacity dedicated to large-area production. It would be the largest factory shutdown in the history of FPD manufacturing.”

Based on the latest IHS Markit Display Supply Demand & Equipment Tracker, demand for large-area FPD applications is expected to grow 5 percent to 6 percent per year from 2016 through 2018; however, capacity dedicated to large-area production is only expected to expand 1 percent in 2017 and 5 percent in 2018. By the second half of 2018, the market is again expected to start trending towards looseness, as even more Chinese capacity is brought on-line, including the world’s first Gen 10.5 factory.

“Historically, the FPD market has corrected itself by reducing factory utilization and delaying capacity expansion plans,” Annis said. “With the rise of Chinese FPD manufacturing, neither of these strategies seemed likely in 2016. This situation has pushed makers in other regions to rationalize their current production assets at unprecedented and unexpected rates ”

Although liquid-crystal display (LCD) has dominated mobile phone displays for more than 15 years, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology is set to become the leading smartphone display technology in 2020, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO). AMOLED displays with a low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) backplane will account for more than one-third (36 percent) of all smartphone displays shipped in 2020, becoming the most-used display technology in smartphone displays, surpassing a-Si (amorphous silicon) thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD and LTPS TFT LCD displays.

“While OLED is currently more difficult to manufacture, uses more complicated materials and chemical processes, and requires a keen focus on yield-rate management, it is an increasingly attractive technology for smartphone brands,” said David Hsieh, senior director, IHS Markit. “OLED displays are not only thinner and lighter than LCD displays, but they also boast better color performance and enable flexible display form factors that can lead to more innovative design.”

Samsung Electronics has already adopted OLED displays in its smartphone models, and there is also increasing demand from Chinese Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Meizu and other smartphone brands. Apple is also now widely expected to use OLED displays in its upcoming iPhone models.

At one time, OLED displays were entirely glass-based and in terms of performance, there was little difference between LCD and OLED displays. Now, flexible OLED displays made from thinner and lighter plastic are enabled and have drawn Apple’s attention. “Apple’s upcoming adoption of OLED displays will be a milestone for OLED in the display industry,” Hsieh said.

Samsung Display, LG Display, Sharp, JDI, BOE, Tianma, GVO, Truly, and CSOT are also starting to ramp up their AMOLED manufacturing capacities and devote more resources to technology development. Samsung Display’s enormous sixth-generation A3 AMOLED fab, for example, will enable even more AMOLED displays to reach the market. Global AMOLED manufacturing capacity will increase from 5 million square meters in 2014 to 30 million square meters in 2020.

“Many display manufacturers were investing in LTPS LCD, thinking it would overtake a-Si technology,” Hsieh said. “However, many of the fabs under construction, especially in China, have had to change their plans to add OLED evaporation and encapsulation tools, because OLED penetration has been more rapid than previously expected.”

By Ed Korczynski, Sr. Technical Editor

Medical and health/wellness monitoring devices provide critical information to improve quality-of-life and/or human life-extension. To meet the anticipated product needs of wearable comfort and relative affordability, sensors and signal-processing circuits generally need to be flexible. The SEMICON West 2016 Flexible Electronics Forum provided two days of excellent presentations by industry experts on these topics, and the second day focused on the medical applications of flexible circuits.

Flexible ultra-thin silicon

While thin-film flexible circuits made with printed thin-film transistors (TFT) have been developed, they are inherently large and slow compared to silicon ICs. Beyond dozens or hundreds of transistors it is far more efficient to use traditional silicon wafer manufacturing technology…if the wafers can be repeatedly thinned down below 50 microns without damage.

Richard Chaney, general manager of American Semiconductor, presented on a “FleX Silicon-on-Polymer” approach that provides a replacement polymer substrate below <1 micron thin silicon to allow for handling and assembly. Processed silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers are front-side temporarily bonded to a “handle-wafer”, then back-side grinded to the buried oxide layer, then oxide chemically removed, and then an application-specific polymer is applied to the backside. After removing the FleX wafer from the handle-wafer, the polymer provides physical support for dicing and the rest of assembly.

For the last few years, the company has been doing R&D and limited pilot production by shipping lots of wafers through partner applications labs, but in the second-half of 2015 acquired a new manufacturing facility in Boise, ID. Process tools are being installed, and the first product dice are “FleX-OPA” operational amplifiers. Initial work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), but in the last 12-18 months the company has seen a major increase in sample requests and capability discussions from commercial companies.

Printed possibilities

Bob Street of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) presented on “Printed hybrid arrays for health monitoring.” There are of course fundamentally different sensor needs for different applications, and PARC is working on many thin-film transducers and circuits:

Gas sensing – outer environment or human breath,

Optical sensing – monitoring body signals such as blood oxygen,

Electrochemical sensing – detect specific enzymes, and

Pressure/Accelerometers – extreme physical conditions such as head concussions

“There are many and various ways that you can do health monitoring,” explained Street. “There will be sensors, and local electronics with amplifiers and logic and switches. One of the prime features of printing is that it is a versatile system for depositing different materials.”

PARC has built an amazing printing system for R&D that includes different functional dispense heads for ink-jet, aerosol, and extrusion so that a wide varieties of viscosities can be handled. The system also include integrated UV-cure capability. Printing tends to have the right spatial resolution on the scale of 50-100 microns for the target applications spaces.

PARC worked on an early system to monitor for head concussions and store event information. They used printed PVDF material to print accelerometers and pressure sensors, as well as ferroelectric analog memory. Various commercially available materials are used to print organic thin-film transistors (OTFT) for digital logic. For complementary digital logic, different metals would conventionally be needed for contacts to the n-type and p-type TFTs, but PARC found an additive layer that could be applied to one type such that a single metal could be used for both.

A gas sensor prototype that can can detect 100-1000ppm of carbon-monoxide was printed using carbon nano-tubes (CNT) as load resistors. They printed a 4-stage complementary inverter to provide gain, using 7 different materials. “This is a case where a very simple device uses many layers,” explained Street. “Four drops of one materials does it, so you wouldn’t look at using a subtractive process for this.”

Rigid/flex integration

Dr. Azar Alizadeh, GE Global Rsearch, presented on “Manufacturing of wearable sensors for human health & performance monitoring.” Wearables in healthcare applications include medical, high exertion, occupational, and wellness/fitness. The Figure shows a flexible blood pressure-sensor that measures from a finger-tip. Future flexible devices are expected to provide more nuanced biometric information to enable personalized medicine, but any commercially viable disposable device will have to cost <$10 to drive widespread adoption. Costs must be limited because just in the US alone the annual amount spent to serve ~50M patients in hospitals is >$880B.

Finger-tip optical blood-pressure sensor created with printed photodetector by GE Corp.

Finger-tip optical blood-pressure sensor created with printed photodetector by GE Corp.

By Shannon Davis, Web Editor

Kateeva is out to change the way displays are being made, and during Tuesday’s Silicon Innovation Forum keynote, Kateeva President and COO Conor Madigan, PhD, laid out how their YIELDJet inkjet system is making that happen.

In recent years, OLED displays have captured the imagination of the industry because of the materials’ capability to enable new kinds of form factors, specifically flexible displays. One of the compelling characteristics of OLED is designers can make a display on a thin piece of plastic, freeing them from rigid glass.

Another compelling aspect, Madigan explained, is that OLED displays have fewer subcomponents than their LCD counter parts, so manufacturing cost can be lower. And he believes inkjet technology will play a key role in making OLED more affordable. His company, Silicon Valley-based Kateeva, has focused their efforts on developing an inkjet platform for OLED manufacturing called YIELDJet, a completely different style of inkjet system.

Kateeva’s YIELDJet inkjet printing platform.

Kateeva’s YIELDJet inkjet printing platform.

When the concept of flexible OLEDs was first catching on, designers had some significant manufacturing obstacles to overcome, Madigan explained. Designers in R&D were using vacuum-based technique for depositing the films in the OLED structure.

“It was very slow; it required planarization to make a smooth surface, and this didn’t do that well,” said Madigan. “There were many particle defects, and the cost was high.”

Kateeva worked with adapting inkjet technology to this process. Madigan explained that YIELDJet uses individual droplets of ink in a pattern, merges that ink together, and then uses UV lights to cure into a single layer, which has improved the quality of the films.

“Nowadays, we’re focused on broadly enabling low cost, mass production OLEDs with inkjet printing,” Madigan said. “What we’re working on now is a general deposition platform for putting down patterned films at high speed over large areas, realizing the full potential of inkjet technology for the display industry.”

In developing Kateeva’s YIELDJet, Madigan said they focused on how the glass would be handled, how to perform maintenance on a printer system that would be completely enclosed in a nitrogen environment, and managing particle decontamination.

YIELDJet employs a technique that floats a panel of glass on a vacuum and pressure holds, holding it at the very edge, which significantly reduces the size of the system when compared to conventional system which requires glass be moved on a large, often bulky holder. To address accessibility of their complicated system, Kateeva engineers made the system fully automated and able to recover quickly if it needed to be opened up to air.

“It was a new thing to make a printer that was low particle contaminating,” said Madigan. “In one of these printers, you have about ten thousand nozzles, to do fast coating.”

Kateeva was able to develop techniques to monitor all of these nozzles simultaneously, resulting in completely uniform coatings and films.

“The analysis that we’ve done with our customers is that, once they can move to inkjet printing, then you’ll quickly see OLED come down to cost parity and even be below LCD in cost,” Madigan concluded.

PC shipments in India totalled nearly 2 million units in the first quarter of 2016, a 7.4 percent decrease over the first quarter of 2015, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Consumers accounted for 45 percent of total PC sales in the first quarter of 2016, down from 48 percent in the first quarter of 2015,” said Vishal Tripathi, research director at Gartner. “There was decline in both the enterprise and consumer segments in buying in the first quarter of 2016. With the first quarter being the end of the financial year for some companies, there were expectations that enterprises would exhaust their budgets. However, it did not have much of an impact on the PC market, and the market continues to face a challenging time.”

White boxes (including parallel imports), which accounted for 28 percent of the overall desktop market, declined 6 percent in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015. In the first quarter, mobile PCs declined by 13 percent year-on-year primarily due to a lack of enthusiasm in consumer buying. In the first quarter of 2016, PC vendors had excess inventory that was carried forward from the fourth quarter of 2015 . Gartner analysts believe that inventory will be carried forward into the second quarter of 2016.

HP was in the number one position in PC shipments in India in the first quarter of 2016 (see Table 1) due to a strong presence in channels and online consumer purchases.

Table 1

India PC Market Share Estimates for First Quarter of 2016 (Percentage of Shipments)

Vendors

1Q16 Market Share (%)

1Q15 Market Share (%)

HP

25.0

25.8

Dell

23.5

23.1

Lenovo

19.4

19.6

Acer

12.2

10.5

Others

19.9

21.0

Total

100.0

100.0

Gartner (June 2016)

Note: PC shipments include desk-based and mobile PCs.

Gigaphoton Inc., a major semiconductor lithography light source manufacturer, announced the successful development of a new series of excimer lasers, the GIGANEX series, an application of Gigaphoton’s highly reliable semiconductor lithography excimer laser technology. In addition, Gigaphoton announced shipment for low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) at large-scale liquid crystal display (LCD) manufacturing plants, mounting the GIGANEX excimer lasers on ultra-compact laser annealing equipment from V-Technology Co., Ltd., a company listed in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange as 7717.

In recent years, Gigaphoton has continued its development work to apply the technologies that arose with the semiconductor lithography excimer laser program to other fields. It has succeeded in developing an excimer laser for use in the ultra-compact laser annealing process for amorphous silicon (a-Si) membranes in FPD manufacturing. A prototype of this new excimer laser, successfully resulting from this development program and known as GIGANEX, has been delivered to a panel manufacturer. It was subsequently used to great effect, to create a prototype, in use at Display Week 2016, held this year from May 22 to 27 in the United States.

The new GIGANEX series excimer lasers for annealing was developed for exclusive use with equipment from V-Technology for use as a light source during the ultra-compact laser annealing process. By incorporating the ultra-compact laser annealing process characteristics into the existing a-Si panel manufacturing process to crystallize the a-Si into poly-silicon (p-Si), enables the manufacturing of incredibly detailed panels, such as 8K panels, which were previously impossible to create using older a-Si processes. The new process is also suited to larger panel production, affording support for large-scale manufacturing plants that manufacture TV panels ranging from 50 to 70 inches, diagonally. This could not have been possible with existing laser annealing processes.

Gigaphoton President and CEO Hitoshi Tomaru notes that he is extremely happy that Gigaphoton’s excimer laser, GIGANEX, has, ahead of its entry into new industries, advanced into the FPD industry and greatly contributed to the success of an LTPS thin-film transistor LCD panel prototype. He went on to say that, moving forward, GIGANEX will become a new solution for flat-panel display (FPD) manufacturing, and that he expects great things for the industry.

GIGANEX

The new GIGANEX excimer laser, which was developed using the immense technical prowess that resulted from Gigaphoton’s experience with semiconductor lithography, is a new brand of excimer laser that targets many fields, beyond FPD manufacturing, flexible device processes, and lithography. Working together with Gigaphoton’s partner companies to give rise to new innovations, Gigaphoton will rely on GIGANEX to provide unique solutions, expanding the possibilities for excimer lasers.

Shipment area of wide color gamut (WCG)  displays is expected to reach 32 million square meters in 2018, which represents 17 percent of total display shipment area, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS),the leading global source of critical information and insight. WCG displays include organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and quantum dot technologies.

“As competition in the display market intensifies, display and TV manufacturers are looking for new and emerging technologies to differentiate their offerings from competitors and to provide consumers with higher screen resolution,” said Richard Son, senior analyst, IHS Technology. “WCG technologies are therefore becoming more popular.”

There are two different kinds of quantum dot materials. One is cadmium-included quantum dot and the other is cadmium-free (Cd-free) quantum dot. Since cadmium is an unsafe and toxic element, the display industry developed Cd-free quantum dot technology to replace it. Cd-free quantum dot displays are forecast to comprise 80 percent of the total quantum dot display market in 2016. Quantum dot is just beginning to be used in TV displays to compete against OLED displays. Active-matrix-OLED (AMOLED), by comparison, is primarily used in smartphone displays.

OLED WCG display shipment area is forecast to reach 4.4 million square meters in 2016, growing to 9.2 million square meters in 2018. Quantum-dot WCG display shipment area will reach 13.4 million square meters in 2018, rising from 6.1 million square meters in 2016.

wide color gamut