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TouchSystems, a provider of professional-grade touch display and digital signage solutions, announced today the latest generation of its P-Series large format touch displays. The 46-inch P4630P-3 touch display is designed for 24/7 operation and features 10-point multi-touch projected capacitive (PCAP) touch technology, OPS compatibility, built-in thermal management, speakers and more in a bezel-free chassis.

The new P4630P-3 features NECs energy efficient LED edge-lighting technology and programmable run time increasing efficiency. The zero-bezel integrated PCAP sensor provides fast touch response without adding bulk. Paired with an optional OPS device, customers will benefit from reduced installation costs and reduced cost of ownership in an aesthetically pleasing complete solution.

The P4630P-3 is ideal for high-traffic areas such as public use terminals, retail outlets, hospitality, kiosks, and healthcare facilities. The display features internal temperature sensors with self-diagnostics and fan-based technology for increased protection against overheating to maximize the lifetime of the investment.

Adding to the display performance, the P4630P-3 features integrated Open Pluggable Specification (OPS) compatibility for best-in-class connectivity. Customers can easily install the media player of their choice without the need for additional brackets, cable management, or related hardware, further reducing implementation costs and providing for cleaner installation.

“This is the ideal product for wide variety of interactive applications,” Said Carol Nordin, President of TouchSystems. “Designed for versatility and ease of integration, featuring durable bezel free PCAP touch technology, 24/7 operation, energy efficient LED backlighting, multiple mounting options and so much more.”

To bolster the high-performance of the P4630P-3 multi-touch display features a 3-year parts and labor warranty that includes the backlight.

A collaboration of researchers from Kumamoto, Yamaguchi, and Osaka Universities in Japan have discovered a new method of drastically changing the color and fluorescence of a particular compound using only oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2) gases. The fully reversible reaction is environmentally friendly since it produces only water as a byproduct. Rather than using electrical or photo energy, the discovery uses energy from the gases themselves, which is expected to become a future trend, to switch the color and fluorescence properties. The technique could be used as a detection sensor for hydrogen or oxygen gases as well as for property controls of organic semiconductors and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).

An efficient chemical synthesis method for picene-13, 14-dione. Credit: Dr. Hayato Ishikawa

An efficient chemical synthesis method for picene-13, 14-dione. Credit: Dr. Hayato Ishikawa

Polyaromatic compounds (PACs) are widely used in fluorescent materials, semiconductor materials, organic EL devices, and organic solar-cell devices. The research performed at Kumamoto University focused on using energy from gases to trigger a molecular switch in a PAC. In particular, focus was placed on H2 as a reductant and O2 as an oxidant.

“We tried to determine the most attractive compounds that could freely and dramatically change the optical properties of the PAC with a redox reaction,” said Associate Professor Hayato Ishikawa from Kumamoto University. “Specifically, we introduced an orthoquinone moiety to the PAC that possessed the most ideal switching properties under a redox reaction with hydrogen and oxygen gases.”

To determine the candidates with the best switching properties, researchers screened several orthoquinone-containing aromatic compounds in a computational study. The ideal molecules clearly showed switching between fluorescence emission and quenching, and between a colored and colorless state.

Picene-13, 14-dione was nominated as the most promising candidate from the computational analysis. The researchers then developed an original protocol to efficiently synthesize the compound from commercially available petroleum raw materials. The key steps for the synthesis were the transition metal-catalyzed coupling reaction and the ring construction reaction by an organocatalyst. This synthetic methodology is also applicable to the synthesis of various other similar compounds or derivatives.

A palladium nanoparticle catalyst was added to the synthesized picene-13, 14-dione and then H2 gas was bubbled into the solution. As predicted by the computational study, a dramatic change in color and fluorescence of the solution was observed; its color and fluorescence changed from yellow to colorless, and from non-fluorescent to blue fluorescent respectively. The subsequent reverse oxidation proceeded smoothly when H2 gas was exchanged for O2 gas, and the solution reverted back to its original state.

“When we performed a detailed analysis, it was revealed that the resultant changes in color and fluorescence were caused by two different molecular states. The prediction of these states, and our ideas about this phenomenon, were strongly supported by both the computational analysis and the experimental results,” said Associate Professor Ishikawa. “This molecular switching technology of an aromatic compound using an orthoquinone moiety is a new insight that appears to have been reported first by our research team.”

An important advantage of this technology is that it is environmentally friendly since the byproduct of the reaction is simply water. Additionally, the synthetic PACs don’t experience very much damage after each reaction meaning that the molecular switch has excellent reusability.

“We have considered a wide range of future applications for this molecular technique,” said Associate Professor Masaki Matsuda, a research collaborator from Kumamoto University. “For example, we can put this molecular sheet into a package of food filled with an inert gas to check whether oxygen, which promotes the spoilage of food, has entered the package. All that would be required is a simple check under a UV light; the package wouldn’t even have to be opened. Organic semiconductors and OLEDs could also benefit from the ability to control optical properties using energy from gases. For example, organic semiconductors could be made to change their electrical properties, and OLEDs could show on/off switching characteristics by using the energy from gas that is supplied to it. The applications for this technology are numerous.”

The findings of this research were published in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition, online edition, on May 4th, 2016.

By Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief

Fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP) is gaining traction, leading to higher I/Os and larger formats, and new mobile displays are pushing the limits of pixel per inch (PPI) while also moving to larger formats. Both trends are driving new requirements for lithography equipment, including steppers, track systems and photoresists. Both packages and displays are employing new types of materials and thinner substrates as well. “There’s a lot of commonality between the advanced display technologies and packaging technologies,” said Rich Rogoff, vice president and general manager of Rudolph’s Lithography Systems Group. “The step-and-repeat system approach is ideally suited to address those challenges.”

Key lithographic challenges of advanced packaging and displays are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Key lithographic challenges of advanced packaging and displays are shown.

Figure 1. Key lithographic challenges of advanced packaging and displays are shown.

Rogoff said another big challenge is the ability to manage what he calls dimensionally unstable material. “These are materials that change with time, with temperature, with humidity and with process steps, every time they come back through a lithography step they can change form. Steppers have to be able to deal with that,” he said.

Rogoff also said he’s seeing changes in imaging chemistries which are creating another challenges. “We’re doing things now from broadband resist to i-line resist, from thin-films to thick films, to dry films to organic chemistries. It’s all over the field here with respect to what types of chemistries are being used to image, and the challenge is of course when going from a thick material to a thin material and varied compositions, you get a much different kind of imaging characteristic. Really you need to be able to manage all of those without having to change your lithography system,” he said.

In packaging applications, large topography is yet another challenge. In a fan-out type of situation, there can be significant differences in heights between the substrate and the die, for example. “You’re having to image through, in some cases, >20 microns of photoresist for a two or three micron line, and that becomes a very big challenge,” Rogoff said. “The package size and the display sizes are also getting bigger, and so you need to try to get as much as you can into one imaging field. The lenses need to have a very large field of view.”

FOWLP, where individual die are connected on redistribution layer, is expected to lead to a major change in process equipment. Today, die are “reconstituted” on a wafer. In the future, as volume increases, a move to high density panels is expected. “As the demand goes up, certainly panels make the most sense,” Rogoff said.

Earlier this year, Rudolph announced that a leading outsourced assembly and test facility (OSAT) has placed an order for the JetStep Lithography System for the semiconductor advanced packaging industry’s first panel manufacturing line. “That’s the first true panel fan-out application that’s moving forward, especially in the OSAT world,” Rogoff said.

While the stepper part of the litho equation is ready for “panelization,” the rest of the industry infrastructure is working from two directions. One, from printed-circuit board type solutions where thick resist are dry films. The other, from the display side, uses thin chemical resists. “Somehow we have to bridge the gap between a thin film and a thick film,” Rogoff said. “These are some of the infrastructure things that are still being worked out, but I think those are relatively easy to solve.”

Elvino da Silveira, Rudolph’s vice president of marketing, said he’s seen some recent changes. “Last year, when we were talking to the various customer and partners that we interact with in terms of the panel level fan out, everybody was really focused on doing reconstituted panels, the face-down type chips. Basically taking the EWLB process and scaling it up to the panel level. As time has gone on, and with TSMC bringing out InFO and so forth, there have been several players that are more open to doing this on a carrier. It adds some costs, but at least based on the general feedback we’ve gotten from some of the industry , scaling up to the larger substrate offsets the additional cost of the carrier,” he said.

Figure 2 (presented at SEMI’s Industry Strategy Symposium in January by Babak Sabi, corporate vice president, director, assembly and test technology department, Intel Corp.) shows the expected progression of packaging technology as IO density increases. Flip chip, ball grid array on the left (the orange box) has 15-60 micron feature sizes depending on the layer and the type of feature being exposed.

Figure 2. As IO density increases, new packaging technologies will be required (SWIFT, SLIT, SLIM and INFO-WLP are trademarks of Amkor, ASE and TSMC). Source: Intel (SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium 2016)

Figure 2. As IO density increases, new packaging technologies will be required (SWIFT, SLIT, SLIM and INFO-WLP are trademarks of Amkor, ASE and TSMC). Source: Intel (SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium 2016)

The next generation, (the yellow box) indicates fan out packaging. “We’re still more towards that boundary between the orange and the yellow, because really no one’s producing sub-five microns in HVM today. Most of it is between 5 and 10,” da Silveira said.

The next level (the green box) indicates embedded technology, such as Intel’s Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB). Instead of using a large silicon interposer typically found in other 2.5D approaches, EMIB uses a very small bridge die, with multiple routing layers. Here, the IOs are getting much higher, and the feature sizes are getting pushed toward two microns. As technology moves from the yellow box to the green box, expect a switch from wafers to panels.

By Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief

N2O, or Nitrous Oxide, also known as laughing gas, is a weak anesthetic gas that has been in use since the late 18th century. Most people have experienced nitrous in the context of dentistry, but it’s also used to make whipped cream, in auto racing, deep sea diving, or – in the semiconductor industry — as the oxygen source for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of silicon oxy-nitride (doped or undoped) or silicon dioxide, where it is used in conjunction with deposition gases such as silane. It’s also used in diffusion, rapid thermal processing and for process chamber treatments.

The problem – and why it’s no laughing matter – is that after CO2 and CH4, N2O is the 3rd most impactful man-induced greenhouse gas (GHG), accounting for 7% of emissions. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 5% of U.S. N2O originates from industrial manufacturing, largely semiconductor manufacturing. “It’s very much of interest because of its high global warming potential, combined with its long atmospheric lifetime of over 100 years,” said Mike Czerniak Environmental Solutions Business Development Manager, Edwards. “After PFCs, this is one of the most impactful gases from semiconductor manufacturing.” With a TLV of 50ppm, N20 is also poses a health risk.

There are two ways to get rid of N2O: reducing and oxidizing. “Reducing means getting rid of the oxygen in it so you just drive it down to be nitrogen, or you can oxidize it and add additional oxygen to it,” Czerniak explained.

Oxidizing is the easier approach in that it involves putting the gas through an ordinary flame. “The problem with doing this is you then make nitrogen oxides, NOx, and that generally is very bad because that’s the gas that’s the acid rain contributor and it also does nasty things to people,” Czerniak said. When NOx and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) react in the presence of sunlight, they form photochemical smog, a significant form of air pollution, especially in the summer. “If you do make NOx, then you probably want to do some additional treatment to try and get rid of the NOx that you’ve generated,” Czerniak said.

Reduction, therefore, is preferable. N2O can be catalytically reduced to H20 + N2. A reducing flame can be used in a combustor; this requires the presence of a reducing agent, such as methane (a commonly used fuel gas) or even a hydrogen-containing process gas such as silane. “You can avoid forming NOx if you use low temperatures, moderate amounts of oxygen, and you add a reducing agent like methane,” Czerniak said.

Edwards presently offers the Atlas series of inward-fired combustion gas abatement solutions. Atlas systems have low fuel consumption compared with previous-generation gas abatement devices and utilize proven Alzeta inward-fired combustor technology to achieve significantly reduced costs of ownership. With one to six inlets with a number of options, including a temperature management system (TMS), they can reach a flow capacity of up to 600 slm and they offer enhanced ease-of-use and more efficient maintenance.

After CO2 and CH4, N2O is the 3rd most impactful man-induced greenhouse gas (GHG). Source: Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, World Resources Institute.

After CO2 and CH4, N2O is the 3rd most impactful man-induced greenhouse gas (GHG). Source: Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, World Resources Institute.

An ultrathin film that is both transparent and highly conductive to electric current has been produced by a cheap and simple method devised by an international team of nanomaterials researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Korea University.

Highly conductive ultrathin film on skin between clips. Credit: Sam Yoon, Korea University

Highly conductive ultrathin film on skin between clips.
Credit: Sam Yoon, Korea University

The film — actually a mat of tangled nanofiber, electroplated to form a “self-junctioned copper nano-chicken wire” — is also bendable and stretchable, offering potential applications in roll-up touchscreen displays, wearable electronics, flexible solar cells and electronic skin.

The finding is reported in the June 13 issue of Advanced Materials.

“It’s important, but difficult, to make materials that are both transparent and conductive,” says Alexander Yarin, UIC Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, one of two corresponding authors on the publication.

The new film establishes a “world-record combination of high transparency and low electrical resistance,” the latter at least 10-fold greater than the previous existing record, said Sam Yoon, who is also a corresponding author and a professor of mechanical engineering at Korea University.

The film also retains its properties after repeated cycles of severe stretching or bending, Yarin said — an important property for touchscreens or wearables.

Manufacture begins by electrospinning a nanofiber mat of polyacrylonitrile, or PAN, whose fibers are about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair. The fiber shoots out like a rapidly coiling noodle, which when deposited onto a surface intersects itself a million times, Yarin said.

“The nanofiber spins out in a spiral cone, but forms fractal loops in flight,” Yarin said. “The loops have loops, so it gets very long and very thin.”

The naked PAN polymer doesn’t conduct, so it must first be spatter-coated with a metal to attract metal ions. The fiber is then electroplated with copper — or silver, nickel or gold.

The electrospinning and electroplating are both relatively high-throughput, commercially viable processes that take only a few seconds each, according to the researchers.

“We can then take the metal-plated fibers and transfer to any surface — the skin of the hand, a leaf, or glass,” Yarin said. An additional application may be as a nano-textured surface that dramatically increases cooling efficiency.

Yoon said the “self-fusion” by electroplating at the fiber junctions “dramatically reduced the contact resistance.” Yarin noted that the metal-plated junctions facilitated percolation of the electric current — and also account for the nanomaterial’s physical resiliency.

“But most of it is holes,” he said, which makes it 92 percent transparent. “You don’t see it.”

GC Asahi Glass (AGC) today announced it has developed a uniform amorphous thin film using a unique sputtering target material, and has started industrialization and commercial production of the material. Called C12A7 Electride, the material is essential to mass production of both the new thin film and large organic electroluminescent (EL) panels – also known as organic LEDs (OLEDs) – utilizing the film.

Asahi Glass Co. Electride Target

Asahi Glass Co. Electride Target

Currently, lithium fluoride (LiF) and alkali-doped organic materials are used as the electron injection material for an OLED display. However, these materials are unstable and are used in an unstable state, which contributes to manufacturing challenges associated with OLED. To address this problem, the AGC Group developed the more stable amorphous C12A7 Electride thin film.

C12A7 is a component of alumina cement. Its structure comprises interconnected “cages,” measuring about 0.4 nanometers (nm) in inner diameter, that contain oxygen ions. C12A7 Electride was developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology by a research group under Professor Hideo Hosono, a material scientist known for the discovery of iron-based superconductors. All of the oxygen ions in the cages are replaced with electrons, enabling the material to conduct electric current like a metal, maintain chemical and thermal stability, and be easy to handle, while retaining the characteristic of readily emitting electrons.

The amorphous C12A7 Electride thin film, which can be formed through a sputtering process [1] at room temperature using the AGC Group-developed target material, has the following unique characteristics: it is transparent in the visible range; it can emit electrons as easily as metal lithium can; and it is chemically stable even in the atmosphere. By combining this with the TFT element, which uses a transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor (TAOS), the low-driving-voltage electron transport layer can be manufactured stably and with high production yields, even when used in an OLED display with an inverted structure.

Market research firm IDTechEx forecasts the market for OLED displays will reach nearly US$16 billion this year and will grow to US$57 billion in 2026. AGC Group’s Naomichi Miyakawa, Principal Manager, New Product R&D Center, Technology General Division, noted, “TAOS-TFT is suitable for driving a large OLED panel, but there was no available material that functions properly as both an electron injection layer and an electron transport layer – both of which are necessary to realize the inverted structure that makes the best of the panel’s performance. With the commercialization of our C12A7 Electride material, we expect to see substantially improved production of oxide TFT-driven OLED panels.”

AGC anticipates OLED panels integrating the new C12A7 Electride-based thin film to begin manufacture in the year of Tokyo Olympic Games, 2020 or earlier.

A method to produce significant amounts of semiconducting nanoparticles for light-emitting displays, sensors, solar panels and biomedical applications has gained momentum with a demonstration by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

While zinc sulfide nanoparticles – a type of quantum dot that is a semiconductor – have many potential applications, high cost and limited availability have been obstacles to their widespread use. That could change, however, because of a scalable ORNL technique outlined in a paper published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology.

Unlike conventional inorganic approaches that use expensive precursors, toxic chemicals, high temperatures and high pressures, a team led by ORNL’s Ji-Won Moon used bacteria fed by inexpensive sugar at a temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit in 25- and 250-gallon reactors. Ultimately, the team produced about three-fourths of a pound of zinc sulfide nanoparticles – without process optimization, leaving room for even higher yields.

The ORNL biomanufacturing technique is based on a platform technology that can also produce nanometer-size semiconducting materials as well as magnetic, photovoltaic, catalytic and phosphor materials. Unlike most biological synthesis technologies that occur inside the cell, ORNL’s biomanufactured quantum dot synthesis occurs outside of the cells. As a result, the nanomaterials are produced as loose particles that are easy to separate through simple washing and centrifuging.

The results are encouraging, according to Moon, who also noted that the ORNL approach reduces production costs by approximately 90 percent compared to other methods.

“Since biomanufacturing can control the quantum dot diameter, it is possible to produce a wide range of specifically tuned semiconducting nanomaterials, making them attractive for a variety of applications that include electronics, displays, solar cells, computer memory, energy storage, printed electronics and bio-imaging,” Moon said.

Successful biomanufacturing of light-emitting or semiconducting nanoparticles requires the ability to control material synthesis at the nanometer scale with sufficiently high reliability, reproducibility and yield to be cost effective. With the ORNL approach, Moon said that goal has been achieved.

Researchers envision their quantum dots being used initially in buffer layers of photovoltaic cells and other thin film-based devices that can benefit from their electro-optical properties as light-emitting materials.

Co-authors of the paper, titled “Manufacturing demonstration of microbially mediated zinc sulfide nanoparticles in pilot-plant scale reactors,” were ORNL’s Tommy Phelps, Curtis Fitzgerald Jr., Randall Lind, James Elkins, Gyoung Gug Jang, Pooran Joshi, Michelle Kidder, Beth Armstrong, Thomas Watkins, Ilia Ivanov and David Graham. Funding for this research was provided by DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office and Office of Science. The paper is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00253-016-7556-y

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/.

Gigaphoton Inc., a major semiconductor lithography light source manufacturer, announced its new excimer laser brand “GIGANEX” on April 1, 2016.

Gigaphoton has announced they will develop a highly reliable excimer laser, “GIGANEX,” utilizing their considerable technical capabilities acquired by their experience in semiconductor lithography, for use in the fields of FPD production, flexible device processing, semiconductor fabrication, etc. Moving forward, Gigaphoton intends to explore further possibilities in excimer lasers, together with new innovative partners, to provide GIGANEX solutions.

Gigaphoton President and CEO Hitoshi Tomaru explains. “Our company has accumulated experience as a major semiconductor lithography light source manufacturer over more than 15 years, and in fiscal 2016 we are embarking on a new challenge – to expand the range of applications of our lasers into other fields. I expect Gigaphoton’s technology to expand even further and continue to contribute to the industrial world.”

Details of GIGANEX will introduced at SID Display Week, which will be held May 24-26, 2016.

Polymer semiconductors, which can be processed on large-area and mechanically flexible substrates with low cost, are considered as one of the main components for future plastic electronics. However, they, especially n-type semiconducting polymers, currently lag behind inorganic counterparts in the charge carrier mobility – which characterizes how quickly charge carriers (electron) can move inside a semiconductor – and the chemical stability in ambient air.

Recently, a joint research team, consisting of Prof. Kilwon Cho and Dr. Boseok Kang with Pohang University of Science and Technology, and Prof. Yun-Hi Kim and Dr. Ran Kim with Gyungsang National University, has developed a new n-type semiconducting polymer with superior electron mobility and oxidative stability. The research outcome was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) as a cover article and highlighted by the editors in JACS Spotlights.

The team modified a n-type conjugated polymer with semi-fluoroalkyl side chains – which are found to have several unique properties, such as hydrophobicity, rigidity, thermal stability, chemical and oxidative resistance, and the ability to self-organize. As a result, the modified polymer was shown to form a superstructure composed of polymer backbone crystals and side-chain crystals, resulting in a high degree of semicrystalline order. The team explained this phenomenon is attributed to the strong self-organization of the side chains and significantly boosts charge transport in polymer semiconductors.

Prof. Cho emphasized “We investigated the effects of semi-fluoroalkyl side chains of conjugated polymers at the molecular level and suggested a new strategy to design highly-performing polymeric materials for next-generation plastic electronics”.

This research was supported by the Center for Advanced Soft Electronics under the Global Frontier Research Program and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.