Investment of 43.75 billion yuan, investment of new Micro OLED factory in China

According to China’s Fujian Daily, a large-scale investment agreement has been recently signed in Quanzhou, China. According to the contents of the agreement, the contents of various agreements including the Micro OLED project, high-purity electronic materials, lithium hexafluorophosphate project, China Datang 5G Southeast Industrial Base project, and integrated circuit start-up investment fund business are included. It consists of high-tech IT industries such as manufacturing, digital economy, and financial services.

It is known that Quanzhou City’s Micro OLED project is planned to divide the total of 4.33 billion yuan into two stages. The first phase of the project is to invest 667 million yuan and build one micro OLED module test production line on a 5000 square meter site. The monthly production capacity is 1 million units (basic size 8 inches), and the production of 100,000 modules is completed on an annual basis. It is estimated that the annual output of the resulting production will reach 350 million yuan. The second phase, which is in progress, is 3.7 billion yuan. One Micro OLED plant is built and the monthly production capacity is 15,000 sheets (12 inches of substrate size), and one Micro OLED plant will be produced to produce 20 million consumer electronics modules.

According to the breaking news reported earlier, the Micro OLED project was also announced at the concentrating cloud contract of Qianzhou City’s major project in 2020, held by the City Hall of Quanzhou on March 19th. At the time, the event was conducted in the form of’meeting site + online linkage of investment destinations’. Vice Minister Wang Yafu of County, Quanzhou City, signed the Huidong Industrial Park Micro OLED business, investing a total of 4.35 billion won with Chairman Wu Wen Tian of 福建恒煦实业有限公司 on behalf of the current government.

Source: Fujian Daily June 5

Samsung Display A3 line replaced with Y-OCTA manufacturing line

The touch panel technology installed on a mobile phone is an important element technology that performs a user interface function. Touch technology is changed from an add-on type to an on-cell type in flexible OLED displays.

The built-in method in which a touch sensor is formed on a thin film encapsulation (TFE) is called by various names such as Y-OCTA(YOUM on-cell touch AMOLED), ToE(touch on encapsulation) or FMLOC(flexible multi-layer on cell touch) for each panel maker. Unlike the add-on type, the on-cell type touch sensor is formed directly on the top of the encapsulation layer without a separate base film. Due to this, the on-cell type has a higher process difficulty than the add-on type, but it is advantageous to manufacture a thin OLED panel thickness, and there is an effect of reducing the process cost.

Recently, in order to apply this on-cell type touch technology to mobile phones using OLEDs, each display manufacturer is undergoing a step-by-step line modification work. Four mask steps are added to apply the on-cell type touch technology. There are two ways to cope with this process step increase: to install and respond to new equipment as much as the process to increase, and to proceed with the process at existing facilities.

Samsung Display decided to use an existing exposure machine to use the on-cell type touch technology in the existing A3 line (Tangjeong), and is in the process of remodeling the 105K capacity TFT production line. In the existing process flow, a back plane process is performed with mother glass of 1500×1800 mm2 and 1500×900 mm2 glass with half-cutting of this mother glass is processed in the OLED process. Therefore, in order to process the half-cut glass again in the back plane equipment, the jig manufacturing method of connecting and processing two cut sheets is applied. After this modification, the production capacity of the A3 line will be reduced. The amount of 105K of the A3 line that is currently being renovated is changed from LTPS process to LTPO process, and it is combined with Y-OCTA process. In this case, 3 mask steps increase as LTPS is changed to LTPO, and 4 additional mask steps increase for Y-OCTA. As a result of the total increase of 7 mask steps, the A3 line is expected to reduce the existing 105K production capacity to approximately 75K level after remodeling.

China’s BOE is also constructing built-in touch processes in B7 and B11. BOE is in the process of adding and processing exposure equipment, etc. as a way to add a built-in touch process. In this case, there will be no significant change in production capa.

<Production capacity comparing with before/after modifying at SDC A3 line>

Deuterium substitution blue, will be next generation blue materials?

Fluorescent blue emitting material is the only fluorescent material used in small and medium-sized OLEDs and large-area OLEDs.

Development of next generation emitting materials such as TADF and hyper-fluorescence is also in progress, but deuterium substitution technology has got attention since it is adopted to Samsung Galaxy S20.

Deuterium substitution technology is to replace hydrogen with deuterium in a compound combined with existing hydrogen, and each company has a difference in substituting the compound before or after synthesis or substituting the whole. Representative development companies for deuterium substitution include Idemitsu Kosan, DuPont, SFC, and JNC.

As related patents, compounds substituted with deuterium with an atomic mass of deuterium that is twice as high as hydrogen have lower zero-energy and lower vibrational energy than those combined with hydrogen, resulting in lower ground-state energy and weaker intermolecular interactions, resulting in a thin film in an amorphous state. It is effective in improving the life of OLED.

It is expected that the OLED device to which the deuterium-substituted compound is applied can improve the lifetime by more than 20% compared to the previous one.