The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as usual was crazy big, and with a few key exceptions (Apple comes to mind; everyone flocked to Las Vegas to demonstrate the latest gadgets and gizmos including, the latest display products. These included mobile devices - both smart phones and tablet PCs; notebook computers and TVs.
The goal of this post is to help you better understand industry terminology and highlight the latest products at this year’s CES enabled by Applied’s display technology.
At the FPD International 2011 show touchpanel applications were everywhere. While the focus was on mobility devices such as smartphones and tablet PC’s; evidence was everywhere that touch is moving to larger applications soon, such as interactive “smart” TV and even a new cool app called “appliance veneer glass” — I’ll describe this in more detail in an upcoming blog post. All of the exhibitors with new mobility device displays touted high resolution and low power consumption as key features.
These days, staying connected to the ones you love or work with is as easy as the touch of a button and the swipe of your finger. It’s hard to image a time without cell phones, without Wi-Fi or god forbid Facebook, let alone the internet all together. Today we have more than 5 billion internet-connected devices, with an expected 22 billion by 2020. And we owe it in part to the ingenuity of two young academics at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) who back in 1969 connected two computers for the first time, sparking what would lead to today’s age of connectivity as we now know it and changing the way we live and play.
Active matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays have been available on high-end smartphones for a while now, and there has been a lot of speculation about when we’ll start to see tablet devices equipped the same screen technology. I would like to take a closer look at why AMOLED technology is so hotly anticipated.
OLED displays use an alternative pixel-lighting mechanism compared to liquid crystal display (LCD) - a mechanism that is simpler in concept and offers advantages over LCD, but introduces numerous technological challenges that display manufacturers are working to overcome.
Dow Jones recently reported on the future of tablet and smartphone displays. As the leading equipment supplier to the display industry, Applied Materials was called on to lend comment to the trends and technologies that will be driving the industry in the coming years.
The 2002 hit movie, Minority Report is the ultimate precursor for the use of touch panel displays today. As you may remember, Tom Cruise’s character is being blamed for a pre-crime that he has not yet committed and manages to stay one step ahead of the police using a multitude of touch panel displays as a control center dashboard with information at the touch of a finger.
Today’s reality is not so far removed from this promise of touchscreen technology. Smart phones and tablet PCs are the most prolific applications for touch panel today. A touch interface allows one to interact directly with a display without the use of a keyboard or mouse and is an enabling technology for the mobile display market which will have sales of around 60 million tablets and 500 million smartphones out of a total of close to 1.7 billion mobile phones in 2011 according to published reports. Almost all tablets and smartphones have touch displays, and touch panel penetration in conventional mobile phones will surpass 50% by 2014.
It is likely you did not hear about the latest exploits of Charlie Sheen or the recent natural disasters from the evening news on television or from the newspaper. You probably did not buy Lady Gaga’s latest CD at a record store. It is more likely that you are participating in a new wave of information sharing – social networking and media downloading – these are driving demand for mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PC’s . We refer to this latest shift as the “fourth wave” of demand expansion in the thin film transistor liquid crystal displays (TFT-LCD) industry.
The history of the cyclical expansion of the TFT-LCD display industry centers on the introduction of popular new display applications that were enabled by ever larger sheets of glass. The first wave being the laptop PC in the mid-1990’s; the desktop monitor in early 2000 and large area TFT-LCD TV’s in the mid-2000’s.
The fourth wave is driven by nothing less than the complete transformation of how we buy music; how we read books; how we get the news; how we watch video, television, movies; and how we socially interact with each other.
Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design’s David Lammers recently covered Applied Materials’ analyst meeting and published an article on the growth and wider adoption of solid-state drives as well as what is driving wafer-level packaging and through-silicon vias.
Mike Splinter appeared on Bloomberg's "Street Smart" to discuss fourth quarter earnings and what future technology trends bode well for the company. The full-length interview can be found on Bloomberg's YouTube channel.