Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Flat Panel Display Co BV is planning to open another factory, probably somewhere in Asia, throwing down the gauntlet to its Japanese rivals in their own backyard. The joint venture between Eindhoven-based Philips Electronics NV, French companies Thomson SA and Sagem SA and E Merck, the German arm of Swiss chemicals and pharmaceuticals group Merck AG, already has a factory in Eindhoven that is the biggest producer, at 40,000 a month (no, not 40,000 a day, as was suggested in Another Place), of liquid crystal diode flat-pane displays outside Japan.
Second factory
Philips, the largest shareholder at 70% of the Flat Panel Display Co, would not say where the second factory will be, saying that there were continents other than Europe and Asia. But given that it is the South Koreans and the Japanese who dominate the flat panel display market, then Asia makes some sense. Last year, analysts O’Mara & Associates of Palo Alto, California urged the US Government to create a partnership between a consortium of US corporations and an established Asian flat panel manufacturer as the only way the US could ever hope to have a chunk of the sizeable flat panel display market (CI No 2,506). The creation of just such a venture should be of the highest priority to the government, said O’Mara, but warned that it only had a year in which to make the investment as technology marches on. Philips, however, is not expected even to decide whether the factory will go ahead until midway through 1996. Philips did say, however, that wherever it finally built the facility it would probably look for local partners, although it is not going to license its proprietary technology, Thin Film Diode and Reset. The chief technological difference between Thin Film Diode and Reset units and thin-film transistor panels is the switching device that controls the pixels. Use of diodes rather than transistors as the switching elements reduces the cost and complexity because a transistor has three active elements, a diode only two. In the Flat Panel Display Co’s units, diodes are used. The panels consist of a layer of amorphous Silicon Nitride sandwiched between two metal layers and this can be used as a diode switch by controlling the voltage across it. Below 3V the switch passes virtually no current; at 10V the current can be increased by a factor of more than 30,000. But the technology suffers because even smallish power fluctuations can affect the image. To sustain a uniform, stable image, there would normally have to be very tight tolerance on the diode dimensions; this would make manufacturing more complex and mean that they were no longer easier to make than displays using thin-film transistors.
By Maya Anaokar
To counteract this instability, Philips has developed, and patented, a reset drive method that generates an extra voltage pulse to the row signal that switches the diode, and this, says the company, is relatively easy to implement. Philips reckons its units are more than up to the challenge of taking on the might of the Japanese, who dominate the flat panel display market, the South Koreans, who are off to an impressive start thanks to heavy investment from their government, and the Americans, who are scrabbling to take on the Asian companies, but by either using the same technology or trying to pioneer exotic new and unproven ones. Other advantages that Philips boasts of, other than the fact that the panels can be made in a shorter time, are an increased aperture – the viewing angle before the image disappears is wider – small size and the claim that they are hardly affected by the ambiant light. The Eindhoven factory is now ramping capacity from 40,000 units a month to 75,000. Philips is rel uctant to say to whom it is selling the selection of screens it is making, but it is using the units in projection televisions. Other uses to which the screens are being put are data graphics and direct view television. Its product range included 5.1 and 5.8 direct view displays; 9.5 monochrome a
nd 10.4 colour displays in the data graphic area; and 2.8, 5.8 and 9.5 projection displays. At the moment, the Flat Panel Display Co has only a fraction of the current $2,900m market, but says that by the turn of the century it will have at least 8% of what promises to be a much bigger market by then. And there is no underestimating the grossness of this market which is second only to that for semiconductors. Philips estimates that the market will grow by 30% each year, to the end of the century. The O’Mara report guesstimated the worldwide market for flat panels at between $14,000m and $21,000m by the year 2000, depending on price reductions for active matrix liquid crystal displays. This growth is attributable to the increasing use of portable computers and notebooks, which currently form 70% of the market for active matrix liquid crystal displays. The markets that the Flat Panel Display Co is going to pursue are notebook, sub-notebook and desktop computers in the data graphics section; direct view screens, currently the 5.8 and 5.1 colour displays, for the entertainment, automotive and telecommunication industries; and consumer and professional customers for projection screens.
Vestigial
The Flat Panel Display Co was formed in 1992 (CI No 1,060) and partner Sagem granted it an exclusive licence to 2s3s TNT patent with permission from France Telecom. The company has also pushed European efforts on flat panel displays, with the formation, with 22 other European companies, universities and institutes, of a European research and development consortium that is being backed by the European Community to the tune of $16.5m from the Esprit III fund. But this is a paltry sum when compared with the $202m pledged by the US government (CI No 2,531) last year to its vestigial home-grown flat panel display industry which also has the American Display Consortium, based in Beaverton, Oregon to hand out grants to companies working on flat-panel display technologies.
