Category Archives: FPDs and TFTs

The phenomenon that forms interference patterns on television displays when a camera focuses on a pattern like a person wearing stripes has inspired a new way to conceptualize electronic devices. Researchers at the University of Illinois are showing how the atomic-scale version of this phenomenon may hold the secrets to help advance electronics design to the limits of size and speed.

In their new study, mechanical science and engineering professor Harley Johnson his co-authors recast a detail previously seen as a defect in nanomaterial design to a concept that could reshape the way engineers design electronics. The team, which also includes mechanical science and engineering graduate student Brian McGuigan and French collaborators Pascal Pochet and Johann Coraux, published its findings in the journal Applied Materials Today.

On display screens, moire patterns occur when the pixelation is at almost the same scale as a photographed pattern, Johnson said, or when two thin layers of a material with a periodic structure, like sheer fabrics and window screens, are placed on top of each other slightly askew.

At the macro scale, moires are optical phenomena that do not form tangible objects. However, when these patterns occur at the atomic level, arrangements of electrons are locked into place by atomic forces to form nanoscale wires capable of transmitting electricity, the researchers said.

“Two-dimensional materials – thin films engineered to be of single-atom thickness – create moire patterns when stacked on top of each other and are skewed, stretched, compressed or twisted,” Johnson said. “The moire emerges as atoms form linear areas of high electron density. The resulting lines create what is essentially an extremely thin wire.”

For decades, physicists observed microscope images of atomic arrangements of 2-D thin films and recognized them as periodic arrays of small defects known as dislocations, but Johnson’s group is the first to note that these are also common moire patterns.

“A moire pattern is simply an array of dislocations, and an array of dislocations is a moire pattern – it goes both ways,” Johnson said. This realization opened the door to what Johnson’s group refers to as moire engineering – what could lead to a new way to manufacture the smallest, lightest and fastest electronics.

By manipulating the orientation of stacked layers of 2-D thin films like graphene, wires of single-atom thickness can be assembled, building the foundation to write nanocircuitry. A wire of single-atom thickness is the limit of thinness. The thinner the wire, the faster electrons can travel, meaning this technology has the potential to produce the quickest transmitting wires and circuits possible, the researchers said.

“There is always the question of how to connect to a circuit that small,” Johnson said. “There is still a lot of work to be done in finding ways to stitch together 2-D materials in a way that could produce a device.”

In the meantime, Johnson’s group is focusing on types of devices that can be made using moire engineering.

“Being able to engineer the moire pattern itself is a path to new lightweight and less-intrusive devices that could have applications in the biomedical and space industries,” he said. “The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of engineers.”

NVIDIA today announced that it is collaborating with Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence across Taiwan’s commercial sector in support of its recently announced AI Grand Plan to help foster domestic AI-related industries.

The collaboration — kicked off with a jointly hosted AI Symposium during NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in Taiwan, which is being attended by more than 1,400 scientists, developers and entrepreneurs — calls for NVIDIA to help MOST promote AI across Taiwan through five initiatives.

“Taiwan has been the epicenter of the PC revolution, and it will serve as a key center for the next industry revolution focused on AI,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “We are delighted to be working closely with MOST to ensure that Taiwan fully harnesses the power of this technological wave.”

“AI is the key to igniting Taiwan’s next industrial revolution, building on the long-established strength of our IT manufacturing capabilities,” said Dr. Liang-Gee Chen, Minister of Science and Technology. “Our focus is on drawing academics, industry and young talent into our AI Grand Plan to create an ecosystem based on AI innovation.”

Under the agreement, the National Center for High-Performance Computing will build Taiwan’s first AI-focused supercomputer powered by NVIDIA® DGX™ AI computing platforms and Volta architecture-based GPUs. Its target is to create a platform for accelerating advanced research and industry applications that next year reaches 4 petaflops of performance – placing it in the top 25 fastest supercomputers in the Top500 list – and 10 petaflops within four years.

In other steps:

  • MOST and NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute will train 3,000 developers over the next four years on the use of deep learning in smart manufacturing, the Internet of Things, smart cities and healthcare. Launched last year, the Deep Learning Institute provides hands-on training for developers, data scientists and researchers through self-paced online labs and instructor-led workshops that use open-source frameworks, as well as NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated deep learning platforms.
  • NVIDIA is rolling out domestically its Inception program to help MOST establish its “Youth Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Base” for local AI startups. NVIDIA’s Inception program is a virtual incubator for startups focused on AI and deep learning, providing young companies with hardware grants, marketing support and access to NVIDIA’s larger deep-learning ecosystem. Just last week, it added its 2,000th member company.
  • NVIDIA will support MOST’s overseas talent training program for post-doctorates by offering high-level internship programs.
  • NVIDIA will provide NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) technology for IoT and SoC devices, plus technical support, to MOST’s Project Moon Shot, AI Edge – its NT$4 billion, four-year program to use AI to increase the competitiveness of the domestic semiconductor industry by focusing on memory, sensors and edge products.

And in a related effort, MOST will provide domestic robotics experts with access to NVIDIA DGX Station™ AI deskside supercomputers and NVIDIA Jetson™ TX2 AI modules through the Central and Southern Taiwan Science Parks. NVIDIA is making available DGX-1 systems for MOST’s Formosa Speech Grand Challenge, in which 150 teams from local universities and high schools will compete at the end of October on creating networks capable of Chinese speech recognition. Taiwan’s AI Grand Plan, which was announced in August, aims to create a strong environment for fostering AI innovations and connect with industrial leadership from around the world.

Scientists at the University of Sussex may have found a solution to the long-standing problem of brittle smart phone screens.

Professor Alan Dalton and his team have developed a new way to make smart phone touch screens that are cheaper, less brittle, and more environmentally friendly. On top of that, the new approach also promises devices that use less energy, are more responsive, and do not tarnish in the air.

Dr. Matthew Large, University of Sussex, flexes a screen made from acrylic plastic coated in silver nanowires and grapheme to illustrate the kind of touch screens that can potentially be produced using the new approach Credit: Dr. Matthew Large

Dr. Matthew Large, University of Sussex, flexes a screen made from acrylic plastic coated in silver nanowires and grapheme to illustrate the kind of touch screens that can potentially be produced using the new approach Credit: Dr. Matthew Large

The problem has been that indium tin oxide, which is currently used to make smart phone screens, is brittle and expensive. The primary constituent, indium, is also a rare metal and is ecologically damaging to extract. Silver, which has been shown to be the best alternative to indium tin oxide, is also expensive. The breakthrough from physicists at the University of Sussex has been to combine silver nanowires with graphene – a two dimensional carbon material. The new hybrid material matches the performance of the existing technologies at a fraction of the cost.

In particular, the way in which these materials are assembled is new. Graphene is a single layer of atoms, and can float on water. By creating a stamp – a bit like a potato stamp a child might make – the scientists can pick up the layer of atoms and lay it on top of the silver nanowire film in a pattern. The stamp itself is made from poly(dimethyl siloxane); the same kind of silicone rubber used in kitchen utensils and medical implants.

Professor Alan Dalton from the school of Maths and Physical Science at the University of Sussex, says:

“While silver nanowires have been used in touch screens before, no one has tried to combine them with graphene. What’s exciting about what we’re doing is the way we put the graphene layer down. We float the graphene particles on the surface of water, then pick them up with a rubber stamp, a bit like a potato stamp, and lay it on top of the silver nanowire film in whatever pattern we like. “And this breakthrough technique is inherently scalable. It would be relatively simple to combine silver nanowires and graphene in this way on a large scale using spraying machines and patterned rollers. This means that brittle mobile phone screens might soon be a thing of the past.

“The addition of graphene to the silver nanowire network also increases its ability to conduct electricity by around a factor of ten thousand. This means we can use a fraction of the amount of silver to get the same, or better, performance. As a result screens will be more responsive and use less power.”

Dr Matthew Large, lead researcher on the project within the school of Maths and Physical Science at the University of Sussex, says:

“Although silver is also a rare metal, like indium, the amount we need to coat a given area is very small when combined with graphene. Since graphene is produced from natural graphite – which is relatively abundant – the cost for making a touch sensor drops dramatically.

“One of the issues with using silver is that it tarnishes in air. What we’ve found is that the graphene layer prevents this from happening by stopping contaminants in the air from attacking the silver. “What we’ve also seen is that when we bend the hybrid films repeatedly the electrical properties don’t change, whereas you see a drift in the films without graphene that people have developed previously. This paves the way towards one day developing completely flexible devices.”

The 63rd annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), to be held December 2-6, 2017 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square hotel, may go down as one of the most memorable editions for the sheer variety and depth of its talks, sessions, courses and events.

Among the most-anticipated talks are presentations by Intel and Globalfoundries, which will each detail their forthcoming competing FinFET transistor technology platforms in a session on Wednesday morning. FinFET transistors are a major driver of the continuing progress of the electronics industry, and these platforms are as important for their commercial potential as they are for their technical innovations.*

Each year at the IEDM, the world’s best technologists in micro/nano/bioelectronics converge to participate in a technical program consisting of more than 220 presentations, along with other events.

“Those who attend IEDM 2017 will find much that is familiar, beginning with a technical program describing breakthroughs in areas ranging from mainstream CMOS technology to innovative nanoelectronics to medical devices. The Sunday Short Courses are also a perennial favorite because they are not only comprehensive but are also taught by accomplished world experts,” said Dr. Barbara De Salvo, Scientific Director at Leti. “But we have added some new features this year. One is a fourth Plenary session, on Wednesday morning, featuring Nobel winner Hiroshi Amano. Another is a revamped Tuesday evening panel. Not only will it focus on a topic of great interest to many people, it is designed to be more open and less formal.”

Other features of the IEDM 2017 include:

  • Focus Sessions on the following topics: 3D Integration and Packaging; Modeling Challenges for Neuromorphic Computing; Nanosensors for Disease Diagnostics; and Silicon Photonics: Current Status and Perspectives.
  • A vendor exhibition will be held, based on the success of last year’s event at the IEDM.
  • The IEEE Magnetics Society will again host a joint poster session on MRAM (magnetic RAM) in the exhibit area. New for this year, though, is that the Society will also hold its annual MRAM Global Innovation Forum on Thursday, Dec. 7 at the same hotel, enabling IEDM attendees to participate. (Refer to the IEEE Magnetics Society website.) The forum consists of invited talks by leading experts and a panel discussion.

Here are details of some of the events that will take place at this year’s IEDM:

90-Minute Tutorials – Saturday, Dec. 2
These tutorials on emerging technologies will be presented by leading technical experts in each area, with the goal of bridging the gap between textbook-level knowledge and cutting-edge current research.

  • The Evolution of Logic Transistors Toward Low Power and High Performance IoT Applications, Dr. Dae Won Ha, Samsung Electronics
  • Negative Capacitance Transistors, Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin, UC Berkeley
  • Fundamental, Thermal, and Energy Limits of PCM and ReRAM, Prof. Eric Pop, Stanford University
  • Hardware Opportunities in Cognitive Computing: Near- and Far-Term, Dr. Geoffrey Burr, Principal Research Staff Member, IBM Research-Almaden
  • 2.5D Interposers and High-Density Fanout Packaging as Enablers for Future Systems Integration, Dr. Venkatesh Sundaram, Associate Director, Georgia Tech 3D Systems Packaging Research Center
  • Silicon Photonics for Next-Generation Optical Interconnects, Dr. Joris Van Campenhout, Program Director Optical I/O, Imec

Short Courses – Sunday, Dec. 3
The day-long Short Courses provide the opportunity to learn about important developments in key areas, and they enable attendees to network with the industry’s leading technologists.

Boosting Performance, Ensuring Reliability, Managing Variability in Sub-5nm CMOS, organized by Sandy Liao of Intel, will feature the following sections:

  • Transistor Performance Elements for 5nm Node and Beyond, Gen Tsutsui, IBM
  • Multi-Vt Engineering and Gate Performance Control for Advanced FinFET Architecture, Steve CH Hung, Applied Materials
  • Sub-5nm Interconnect Trends and Opportunities, Zsolt Tokei, Imec
  • Transistor Reliability: Physics, Current Status, and Future Considerations, Stephen M. Ramey, Intel
  • Back End Reliability Scaling Challenges, Variation Management, and Performance Boosters for sub-5nm CMOS,Cathyrn Christiansen, Globalfoundries
  • Design-Technology Co-Optimization for Beyond 5nm Node, Andy Wei, TechInsights

Merged Memory-Logic Technologies and Their Applications, organized by Kevin Zhang of TSMC, will feature the following sections:

  • Embedded Non Volatile Memory for Automotive Applications, Alfonso Maurelli, STMicroelectronics
  • 3D ReRAM: Crosspoint Memory Technologies, Nirmal Ramaswamy, Micron
  • Ferroelectric Memory in CMOS Processes, Thomas Mikolajick, Namlab
  • Embedded Memories Technology Scaling & STT-MRAM for IoT & Automotive, Danny P. Shum, Globalfoundries
  • Embedded Memories for Energy-Efficient Computing, Jonathan Chang, TSMC
  • Abundant-Data Computing: The N3XT 1,000X, Subhasish Mitra, Stanford University

Plenary Presentations – Monday, Dec. 4

  • Driving the Future of High-Performance Computing, Lisa Su, President & CEO, AMD
  • Energy-Efficient Computing and Sensing: From Silicon to the Cloud, Adrian Ionescu, Professor, EPFL
  • System Scaling Innovation for Intelligent Ubiquitous Computing, Jack Sun, VP of R&D, TSMC

Plenary Presentation – Wednesday, Dec. 6

  • Development of a Sustainable Smart Society by Transformative Electronics, Hiroshi Amano, Professor, Nagoya University. Dr. Amano received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for the invention of efficient blue LEDs, which sparked a revolution in innovative, energy-saving lighting. His talk will be preceded by the Focus Session on silicon photonics.

Evening Panel Session – Tuesday evening, Dec. 5

  • Where will the Next Intel be Headquartered?  Moderator: Prof. Philip Wong, Stanford

Entrepreneurs Lunch
Jointly sponsored by IEDM and IEEE EDS Women in Engineering, this year’s Entrepreneurs Lunch will feature Courtney Gras, Executive Director for Launch League, a local nonprofit focused on developing a strong startup ecosystem in Ohio. The moderator will be Prof. Leda Lunardi from North Carolina State University. Gras is an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. After leaving her job as a NASA power systems engineer to work for on own startup company, she discovered a passion for building startup communities and helping technology-focused companies meet their goals. Named to the Forbes ’30 Under 30′ list in 2016, among many other recognitions and awards, Gras enjoys sharing her stories of founding a cleantech company with young entrepreneurs. She speaks on entrepreneurship, women in technology and clean energy at venues such as TEDx Budapest, the Pioneers Festival, and the IEEE WIE International Women’s Leadership Conference.

 

Gartner, Inc. this week highlighted the top strategic technology trends that will impact most organizations in 2018. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which took place through Thursday.

Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use, or which are rapidly growing trends with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years.

“Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2018 tie into the Intelligent Digital Mesh. The intelligent digital mesh is a foundation for future digital business and ecosystems,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “IT leaders must factor these technology trends into their innovation strategies or risk losing ground to those that do.”

The first three strategic technology trends explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are seeping into virtually everything and represent a major battleground for technology providers over the next five years. The next four trends focus on blending the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive, digitally enhanced environment. The last three refer to exploiting connections between an expanding set of people and businesses, as well as devices, content and services to deliver digital business outcomes.

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2018 are:

AI Foundation
Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously will be a major battleground for technology vendors through at least 2020. The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.

“AI techniques are evolving rapidly and organizations will need to invest significantly in skills, processes and tools to successfully exploit these techniques and build AI-enhanced systems,” said Mr. Cearley. “Investment areas can include data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation. Multiple constituencies including data scientists, developers and business process owners will need to work together.”

Intelligent Apps and Analytics
Over the next few years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI. Some of these apps will be obvious intelligent apps that could not exist without AI and machine learning. Others will be unobtrusive users of AI that provide intelligence behind the scenes. Intelligent apps create a new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems and have the potential to transform the nature of work and the structure of the workplace.

“Explore intelligent apps as a way of augmenting human activity and not simply as a way of replacing people,” said Mr. Cearley. “Augmented analytics is a particularly strategic growing area which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers and citizen data scientists.”

AI has become the next major battleground in a wide range of software and service markets, including aspects of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Packaged software and service providers should outline how they’ll be using AI to add business value in new versions in the form of advanced analytics, intelligent processes and advanced user experiences.

Intelligent Things
Intelligent things are physical things that go beyond the execution of rigid programming models to exploit AI to deliver advanced behaviors and interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people. AI is driving advances for new intelligent things (such as autonomous vehicles, robots and drones) and delivering enhanced capability to many existing things (such as Internet of Things [IoT] connected consumer and industrial systems).

“Currently, the use of autonomous vehicles in controlled settings (for example, in farming and mining) is a rapidly growing area of intelligent things. We are likely to see examples of autonomous vehicles on limited, well-defined and controlled roadways by 2022, but general use of autonomous cars will likely require a person in the driver’s seat in case the technology should unexpectedly fail,” said Mr. Cearley. “For at least the next five years, we expect that semiautonomous scenarios requiring a driver will dominate. During this time, manufacturers will test the technology more rigorously, and the nontechnology issues such as regulations, legal issues and cultural acceptance will be addressed.” 

Digital Twin
A digital twin refers to the digital representation of a real-world entity or system. Digital twins in the context of IoT projects is particularly promising over the next three to five years and is leading the interest in digital twins today. Well-designed digital twins of assets have the potential to significantly improve enterprise decision making. These digital twins are linked to their real-world counterparts and are used to understand the state of the thing or system, respond to changes, improve operations and add value. Organizations will implement digital twins simply at first, then evolve them over time, improving their ability to collect and visualize the right data, apply the right analytics and rules, and respond effectively to business objectives.

“Over time, digital representations of virtually every aspect of our world will be connected dynamically with their real-world counterpart and with one another and infused with AI-based capabilities to enable advanced simulation, operation and analysis,” said Mr. Cearley. “City planners, digital marketers, healthcare professionals and industrial planners will all benefit from this long-term shift to the integrated digital twin world.”

Cloud to the Edge
Edge computing describes a computing topology in which information processing, and content collection and delivery, are placed closer to the sources of this information. Connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and greater functionality embedded at the edge favors distributed models. Enterprises should begin using edge design patterns in their infrastructure architectures — particularly for those with significant IoT elements.

While many view cloud and edge as competing approaches, cloud is a style of computing where elastically scalable technology capabilities are delivered as a service and does not inherently mandate a centralized model.

“When used as complementary concepts, cloud can be the style of computing used to create a service-oriented model and a centralized control and coordination structure with edge being used as a delivery style allowing for disconnected or distributed process execution of aspects of the cloud service,” said Mr. Cearley.

Conversational Platforms
Conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world. The burden of translating intent shifts from user to computer. The platform takes a question or command from the user and then responds by executing some function, presenting some content or asking for additional input. Over the next few years, conversational interfaces will become a primary design goal for user interaction and be delivered in dedicated hardware, core OS features, platforms and applications.

“Conversational platforms have reached a tipping point in terms of understanding language and basic user intent, but they still fall short,” said Mr. Cearley. “The challenge that conversational platforms face is that users must communicate in a very structured way, and this is often a frustrating experience. A primary differentiator among conversational platforms will be the robustness of their conversational models and the application programming interface (API) and event models used to access, invoke and orchestrate third-party services to deliver complex outcomes.” 

Immersive Experience
While conversational interfaces are changing how people control the digital world, virtual, augmented and mixed reality are changing the way that people perceive and interact with the digital world. The virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) market is currently adolescent and fragmented. Interest is high, resulting in many novelty VR applications that deliver little real business value outside of advanced entertainment, such as video games and 360-degree spherical videos. To drive real tangible business benefit, enterprises must examine specific real-life scenarios where VR and AR can be applied to make employees more productive and enhance the design, training and visualization processes.

Mixed reality, a type of immersion that merges and extends the technical functionality of both AR and VR, is emerging as the immersive experience of choice providing a compelling technology that optimizes its interface to better match how people view and interact with their world. Mixed reality exists along a spectrum and includes head-mounted displays (HMDs) for augmented or virtual reality as well as smartphone and tablet-based AR and use of environmental sensors. Mixed reality represents the span of how people perceive and interact with the digital world.

Blockchain
Blockchain is evolving from a digital currency infrastructure into a platform for digital transformation. Blockchain technologies offer a radical departure from the current centralized transaction and record-keeping mechanisms and can serve as a foundation of disruptive digital business for both established enterprises and startups. Although the hype surrounding blockchains originally focused on the financial services industry, blockchains have many potential applications, including government, healthcare, manufacturing, media distribution, identity verification, title registry and supply chain. Although it holds long-term promise and will undoubtedly create disruption, blockchain promise outstrips blockchain reality, and many of the associated technologies are immature for the next two to three years.

Event Driven
Central to digital business is the idea that the business is always sensing and ready to exploit new digital business moments. Business events could be anything that is noted digitally, reflecting the discovery of notable states or state changes, for example, completion of a purchase order, or an aircraft landing. With the use of event brokers, IoT, cloud computing, blockchain, in-memory data management and AI, business events can be detected faster and analyzed in greater detail. But technology alone without cultural and leadership change does not deliver the full value of the event-driven model. Digital business drives the need for IT leaders, planners and architects to embrace event thinking.

Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust
To securely enable digital business initiatives in a world of advanced, targeted attacks, security and risk management leaders must adopt a continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) approach to allow real-time, risk and trust-based decision making with adaptive responses. Security infrastructure must be adaptive everywhere, to embrace the opportunity — and manage the risks — that comes delivering security that moves at the speed of digital business.

As part of a CARTA approach, organizations must overcome the barriers between security teams and application teams, much as DevOps tools and processes overcome the divide between development and operations. Information security architects must integrate security testing at multiple points into DevOps workflows in a collaborative way that is largely transparent to developers, and preserves the teamwork, agility and speed of DevOps and agile development environments, delivering “DevSecOps.” CARTA can also be applied at runtime with approaches such as deception technologies. Advances in technologies such as virtualization and software-defined networking has made it easier to deploy, manage and monitor “adaptive honeypots” — the basic component of network-based deception.

Gartner clients can learn more in the Gartner Special Report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2018.” Additional detailed analysis on each tech trend can be found in the Smarter With Gartner article “Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018.”

In a flexible display, the backplane, frontplane, and any encapsulants are all made from flexible materials. To date, such displays have been used primarily because they are thinner, lighter, and more durable than comparable rigid displays, and to a lesser extent because they are conformable to rigid but non-flat surfaces in devices such as mobile phone handsets, automobile dashboards, and appliance control panels.

In 2017, key flexible display components achieved cost and performance parity with their rigid counterparts for the first time, thus removing a key market barrier and opening the door to rapid adoption in a variety of otherwise-rigid devices such as e-readers and wearables. Such displays may also be incorporated into truly flexible devices such as credit cards, shelving labels, and smart signage, and in the near future they may form the basis of rollable and foldable devices that define entirely new market categories.

According to a new report from Tractica, the four leading technologies in flexible displays are LED, LCD, OLED, and e-paper, and the main applications for these technologies are phones and tablets, wearables, shelving labels, signage, automotive dashboards, appliance control panels, TV and video displays, smart cards, e-writers, and e-readers. The market intelligence firm forecasts that flexible display shipments will increase from 169.9 million units in 2017 to 642.6 million units annually by 2022.

“The effect of flexible and conformable displays will be transformational,” says senior analyst Wil McCarthy. “They will literally change the appearance and function of our personal devices, our vehicles, our homes, and the built environment.”

Tractica’s report, “Flexible Displays”, examines the market trends and technology issues surrounding flexible displays and presents 6-year market forecasts, segmented by world region, for flexible display unit shipments, square meters, device pricing and revenue, and software applications during the period from 2017 through 2022. Flexible display applications are analyzed in depth, and the report also includes detailed profiles of 13 key industry players. An Executive Summary of the report is available for free download on the firm’s website.

The large thin film transistor (TFT) display market is expected to continue to expand in 2017 despite slower end-market demand, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).

While unit shipments are expected to be up 1 percent in 2017 to 688 million units, compared to the previous year, area shipment forecasts show growth of 6 percent in the same period, to 180 million square meters.

Figure 1

Among displays of 9 inches or larger, tablet PC displays are on track to record the highest year-on-year growth in unit shipments in 2017, with 10 percent growth to 93 million units. “It is because first-tier set brands are increasing the number of tablet PC models with larger screens. The new 10.5-inch iPad pro is a good example,” said Peter Su, principal analyst at IHS Markit.

The second fastest-growing application is notebook PC displays, with a 4 percent year-on-year growth to about 175 million units. “Chinese panel makers are aggressively trying to expand in this market, while first-tier panel makers are actually retreating panel production,” Su said.

On the flip side, TV displays are showing a contraction in 2017 by 3 percent year on year, dropping to 257 million units due to slower end-market demand. “Prices of large displays, particularly TV panels, have stayed high for almost a year. TV brands started revising down their business plan, cutting their panel purchases,” Su said.

In terms of area shipments, however, large displays for all applications are forecast to see growth in 2017 as larger screens become more popular with consumers. TV display accounts for 78 percent of total large display shipments by area, and is expected to see a 5 percent growth in 2017.

“First-tier panel makers, especially South Korean companies, already started shifting their production to larger sizes — 49 inches or larger — while reducing production of smaller panels, with lower profitability, to achieve better financial performance,” Su said. “Chinese panel makers are following suit and started increasing production of larger TV displays to 43-inch or larger.”

For a panel manufacturer’s perspective, preparing for potential oversupply in the near future is another reason behind the TV size migration. New fabs are under construction in China, including 10.5 generation, and could increase supply significantly.  “One way for panel makers to overcome the oversupply is to increase area consumption via size migration,” Su said.

LG Display is expected to continue accounting for the largest market share in 2017 with 21 percent as measured by unit shipments. BOE, a Chinese display maker that has been increasing its shipments significantly, is forecast to take 20.7 percent, up 2 percentage points from 2016, gaining on LG Display.

Figure 2

“As TV makers struggle to trigger replacement cycles, WCG and HDR and their notable picture quality improvements are the next growth drivers for the TV industry,” announced Eric Virey, Senior Market & Technology Analyst, LED, Sapphire & Displays at Yole Développement (Yole).

Various technologies are competing to deliver those features. In the short and mid-term, the best-positioned ones are OLED and the well-established, dominant, LCD technology supercharged with narrow-band phosphor LEDs or QD color converters in the backlight unit. Yole analysts delivered a deep analysis of the WCG display and QD technologies, status and prospects, roadblocks and key players with a dedicated technology & market report titled: Quantum Dots & Wide Color Gamut Display Technologies.

What is the status and benefits of QD technologies? After QD-Vision demise, what are the companies that can answer to the demand of the fast growing LCD market? How will the competitive landscape evolve, especially with OLED solutions?

wide color gamut

The “More than Moore” market research and strategy consulting company Yole offers you a snapshot of the QD technologies, its applications and the players involved.

Quantum Dots enable drastic enhancements of display color gamut. They do so with high efficiency, giving display makers headroom to increase brightness, contrast and gamut without increasing power consumption.

Their most common implementation is as color conversion films located in the LCD backlight unit. In this form, QDs are drop-in solutions that can be easily deployed on all sizes of displays without any process change or CapEx . QDs therefore enable the LCD industry to boost the performance of its products without major investment. This contrasts with OLEDs, which require building multibillion-dollar dedicated fabs.

However, QDs do not solve some of LCD shortcomings. Mostly, LCD still lag behind OLEDs in terms of response times, black levels and viewing angles. Also, LCDs cannot deliver pixel-level dimming, the strongest selling point for OLED displays. In the near future, QDs could substitute for LCD color filters. Unlike films, this configuration requires some process changes in LCD manufacturing.

However, it would double the display efficiency, further improve color gamut and provide viewing angles similar to OLED.

In the longer term, EL-QD could deliver OLED-like characteristics and performance, with improved brightness and stability.

“QDs and related technologies will take advantage of OLED TV capacity constraints,” says Dr Eric Virey from Yole.

LG Display is currently the only OLED TV panel manufacturer. The company announced that it will stop investing in LCD and build two new OLED TV manufacturing lines in Korea and China, slated to start production in late 2019. Cost and technology barriers to entry are high, and few other companies will be able to manufacture OLED TV panels in that timeframe. Unless OLED printing technologies progress fast enough to enable cost efficient manufacturing of large, full RGB displays, OLED TV adoption will therefore remain capacity-constrained to less than 12 million units per year until 2022.

QDs will take advantage of this window of opportunity to capture the lion’s share of the WCG and HDR TV market. Rapidly improving performance and decreasing cost is already enabling adoption to spread into mid-range, sub-US$1000 models opening a high volume markets still forbidden to OLED for cost and capacity reasons. Display makers will use QDs to keep extracting more value from existing LCD fab. For the long term, many are hedging their bets and looking at both RGB printed OLED and EL-QDs.

In the mid-term however, QDCF configurations represent an attractive opportunity to close the gap with OLED in term of viewing angles and widen it in term of gamut and efficiency. QDCF however requires some LCD manufacturing process changes. Although moderate compared to a new OLED fab, not every LCD maker will want to commit the required CapEx or even develop the technology.
In the longer term, both OLED and QD-enhanced LCD could face competition from new, disruptive technologies such as the already mentioned electroluminescent QDs or even microLEDs, which could drive a potential paradigm shift, offering alternatives to OLED in self-emissive display technologies. Other technological innovations could also disrupt the QD market. For example, commercialization of a narrow-band green phosphor could eliminate the performance gap between phosphors and QD films and enable a more cost-effective solution.

The overall utilization rate of display panel fabrication (fab) plants is expected to remain high in the third quarter of 2017, recording similar levels for the fifth consecutive quarter, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).

Figure 1

Figure 1

According to the latest Display Production & Inventory Tracker by IHS Markit, the overall fab utilization rate is expected to reach 91 percent in the third quarter, up 1.8 percentage points from the previous quarter and up 1.1 percentage points from the same period last year.

Figure 2

Figure 2

“One of the main contributing factors for higher utilization rates in the past few quarters is that display panel makers are making sure their inventories are optimized at healthy levels,” said Alex Kang, senior analyst at IHS Markit.

Production of large LCD panels, which take the majority of overall display production in terms of area, is expected to be 2.2 percent higher than actual shipments in the third quarter. This is a result of display makers wanting to build contingency, or wriggle room, in their utilization plans as part of their strategy to offset any unexpected lower utilization rates, which could trigger off higher costs.

“As a result, panel makers’ inventory will increase, but it will still remain within healthy ranges,” Kang said.

According to IHS Markit, panel makers are expected to keep high utilization rate throughout the second half of 2017. As production capacity increase has slowed down and panel makers are expected to keep managing inventory levels within healthy limits, they will still have some room to stock up from production surplus volumes.

The popularity of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs and smartphones has boosted not only the OLED display market but also the OLED encapsulation materials market. According to IHS Markit(Nasdaq: INFO),  the OLED encapsulation materials market is expected to grow 4.7 percent in 2017 compared to a year ago, to $117 million.

“The market is forecast to grow even faster as Chinese and South Korean panel makers have aggressively invested in new OLED fabs, resulting in the increase in OLED shipments in terms of area,” said Richard Son, senior analyst at IHS Markit. In particular, South Korean Chinese panel makers recently announced new OLED fab investment plans for not only Gen 6 but also Gen 8.5 and even for Gen 10.5.

As a result of the investment, the OLED encapsulation materials market is forecast to reach $232.5 million by 2021, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16 percent from 2017.

OLED_encapsulation_materials_market_forecast

Unlike thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD), OLED displays require encapsulation as the organic elements are vulnerable to moisture. The OLED encapsulation materials can be categorized into metal, frit glass, thin-film encapsulation (TFE) and hybrid.

The metal type is expected to lead the market in terms of revenue because it is mainly used for OLED TVs whose growth is fastest. However, with Chinese smartphone brands releasing a wide range of new products with OLED panels, demand for frit glass encapsulation materials, which are currently applied to smartphones with rigid-OLED displays, will remain steady, though losing its market share.

According to the AMOLED Encapsulation Materials Report 2017 by IHS Markit, in terms of revenue, metal type encapsulation is expected to account for 50 percent and the frit glass type to take 43 percent in 2017, and 67 percent and 23 percent in 2021, respectively.

OLED_encapsulation_market_share_forecast_by_technology

“Hybrid encapsulation, which combines TFE with a barrier film, has high production cost and its flexibility is limited, and thus demand for the hybrid type will not increase significantly,” Son said. “However, the latecomers are focusing on the hybrid encapsulation as it has a lower technological entry barrier compared to TFE, allowing them to succeed in mass production faster than when using TFE.”

From a mid- and long-term perspective, the hybrid encapsulation materials market will continue to grow for a while. TFE and the hybrid type are expected to take 6 percent and 1 percent of the encapsulation materials revenue market in 2017, respectively, but they will grow to reach 7 percent and 3.5 percent respectively in 2021.

The AMOLED Encapsulation Materials Report 2017 by IHS Markit provides information about the entire range of OLED encapsulation materials shipments by technology and application, including five-year forecast. Latest industry trends, including new technology development trends, are also updated.