Display industry ventures into AMOLED line

Mainland China manufacturers are expanding to AMOLED to boost competitiveness in the global market amid soaring sales of mobile phones, the display technology’s main application. Other opportunities are opening up as well, such as in car electronics.

Visionox and Kunshan New Flat Panel Display (FPD) Technology Center Co. Ltd established the mainland’s first AMOLED line in June this year. The facility, which is located in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, produces 3 to 12in panels and will later expand to 12 to 17in models. Applications cover a range of electronic products, including mobile phones, portable media players and notebook PCs.

Earlier, Visionox cooperated with Taiwan’s AUO on a prototype that requires minimum power consumption.

The product features a 2.4in 240×320-pixel display. It is made of new electron transport layer materials developed by Visionox and Tsinghua University, while AUO provided the TFT substrate.

Visionox is a major supplier of OLED panels, currently ranking fifth worldwide in terms of shipments. It constructed the first PMOLED line in 2002 and began mass manufacture last year.

Other makers have started investing in new production lines for small and medium panels. The Irico Group plans to spend about $1.4 billion on a 4.5G facility in Foshan, Guangdong province. The AMOLED unit of Tianma will run trial production in 2H10. Its capacity is expected to reach 250,000 units.

LG Display has likewise begun building a new 4.5G line that will manufacture both LTPS and AMOLED panels. CMEL plans to begin mass production of AMOLED panels in 3Q10, while Singapore-based AFPD will devote 15,000 substrates, or one third of its monthly capacity, to AMOLED production next year.

AMOLED is considered the next generation display technology that pairs active-matrix backplane from a traditional TFT with an OLED. Compared with TFT LCDs, it has a thinner form factor, wider viewing angle, higher contrast ratio and faster response time.