Development of OLED Equipment Manufacturing Technology

Development of OLED Equipment Manufacturing Technology

OLED (Organic Light Emitting Display) is a new generation of flat panel display technology after LCD, LED, CRT and PDP (Plasma Display Panel). It has significant new industry characteristics. OLED is a new type of pure solid (CRT and PDP), which is a new type of pure solid (and LCD) with advantages of LCD and CRT. Besides, OLED has advantages of self luminous (no back light source), simple structure, ultra thin, fast response, wide viewing angle, low power consumption and flexible display, etc. It is known as “fantastic display technology” (view Table 1 and Table 2).

OLED two major application markets is for display and lighting, which is to show the development of the application is more rapid. Today, display technology of OLED need to overcome some challenges to have a real impact on the market. First of all, the OLED display manufacturing process is not yet matured, large size screen is difficult to mass production. With the increase of the size of the OLED display, the loss of the finished product rate and the loss of the manufacturing are also increasing. Secondly, the service life of OLED display material still needs to be further improved.

According to the drive mode classification, the OLED device can be divided into passive drive (also known as passive drive, PM-OLED) and active drive (also known as active drive, AM-OLED). PM-OLED device does not use thin film transistor (TFT), generally applied to small and medium size display. AM-OLED device is suitable for large size display, especially for large size full color dynamic image display. Compared with PM-OLED, the new display which we say is usually AM-OLED, which has the characteristics of fast response speed, wide angle of view, and has more application fields. Compared to the traditional TFT-LCD LCD panel, the AM-OLED panel has many advantages, such as thin body, high contrast, rich color, high resolution, wide visual angle, low power consumption and so on. In addition, because the OLED panel has no liquid molecules, the seismic performance is better, low temperature resistance, strong and durable. At the same time, compared with millisecond response TFT-LCD panel, AM-OLED panel response time is its thousands of tailing and dynamic picture jitter problem does not appear to. Therefore, AM-OLED has been the industry consensus as a new type of flat panel display technology”. At present, the application of the small and medium size AM-OLED panels in the high-end mobile phone is a foregone conclusion, but it is not enough to produce a revolution in the large size TV.

Generally speaking, OLED manufacturing equipment mainly include: organic vapor plating and packaging of the passive organic light emitting display (PM-OLED) with key equipment, sputtering, plasma enhanced chemical vapor phase deposition (PECVD) system, vacuum thermal evaporation system (VTE) etc. AM-OLED has thin film transistor (TFT) thin film deposition apparatus, coating machine, exposure machine, dry and wet etching machine etc. AM-OLED TFT graphics making equipment, annealing furnace, annealing gas pipeline, laser annealing equipment of AM-OLED with TFT annealing equipment, TFT electrical test equipment, OLED optical test equipments AM-OLED test equipment, laser repair machine AM-OLED with defect detection and repair equipment etc..

2011 OLED technology progress rapidly, and in 2012 will be AM-OLED production technology has reached the mature and applied to large-scale panel production began. Over the next ten years, OLED technology will continue to flourish, especially in organic light emitting materials, organic coating material, circuit drive way and encapsulation technology has pretty good progress. Although the current OLED maximum production of glass substrate for 5.5 generations, but the 5.5 generation of the production cost structure is not clear. With the gradual maturity of AM-OLED technology, AM-OLED panel manufacturers will begin to import production in large size applications.