Display

I attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week for the fifth straight year, and as always, it was dazzling. CES is where the major consumer electronics makers reveal the new products they are planning to release in the upcoming year. This year the major featured trends included new tablet PCs from a variety of makers, amazingly sleek and lightweight “ultrabooks”, more and better 3-D products, and interactivity through gesture recognition. However, this year the most stunning theme was large, beautiful TVs using a variety of technologies. Naturally, this is what interested me the most and in this blog post I’ll tell you why and about the trends for 2012.

Applied Materials has a long history of supporting arts in our neighborhood communities and this year we had the pleasure to collaborate with San Jose State University (SJSU) to design our 2011 Holiday E-Card. A team of young, impressive, and highly creative students from the Animation/Illustration’s “Shrunken Head Man Club” within SJSU’s Art Department did an outstanding job of creating a family (literally) of semiconductor and LCD enabling products and made them come to life in a fun and whimsical way. Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Left to Right: Appliance with Veneer glass; 75” Smart 3-D TV by Samsung; AUO’s 32” Metal Oxide TFT OLED;  85” 8K4K Super Hi Vision by Sharp.At this year’s FPD International show the displays on exhibit were larger, thinner, of higher resolution, smarter, touchable and energy efficient. In this blog post I’ll attempt to give you a glimpse into the latest and greatest display technology I saw on exhibit at the show.

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.

Applied Materials’ is at FPD International in Yokohama, Japan this week from October 26-28, presenting the theme “Enabling an Interactive Visual World.” Prominently featured at this year’s show is the AKT-20KPX PECVD system for high mobility backplanes driving smartphones and tablet PC’s and the Aristo Twin PVD for touch panel applications.

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.

Just this year, we have seen a virtual explosion of touch panel growth fueled by the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for touch-enabled devices. It is hard to say whether this growth will be tempered or continue amidst the promise of even greater adoption of mobility devices and invention of new “must have” products. In either case, touch technology is now a permanent member of the flat panel display family.I marvel at how the industry has evolved over the past few years. Three years ago, I had the opportunity to take a position as Head of our Web Products Group in Germany (the group that makes our roll-to-roll vacuum deposition tools). At that time we strengthened our focus on Flexible Electronics, looking at opportunities in flexible solar, displays, printed circuit boards and several different transparent conductor-based applications including touch screen elements. Ironically, the team had already been addressing this market for years, with sales of roll-to-roll sputtering tools for indium tin oxide (ITO) since the early 1980s, but it had remained relatively small and stable due to modest annual growth in resistive touch technology.

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.

Earlier this week I gave the keynote speech at the Emerging Display Technologies Conference in San Jose, Calif. and discussed the five waves of demand for the display industry and where we’ll be headed in the near future.