8k tft lcd supplier factory

TFT (Thin Film Transistor) LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) dominates the world flat panel display market now. Thanks for its low cost, sharp colors, acceptable view angles, low power consumption, manufacturing friendly design, slim physical structure etc., it has driven CRT(Cathode-Ray Tube) VFD ( Vacuum Fluorescent Display) out of market, squeezed LED (Light Emitting Diode) displays only to large size display area. TFT LCD displays find wide applications in TV, computer monitors, medical, appliance, automotive, kiosk, POS terminals, low end mobile phones, marine, aerospace, industrial meters, smart homes, handheld devices, video game systems, projectors, consumer electronic products, advertisement etc. For more information about TFT displays, please visit our knowledge base.

There a lot of considerations for how to choose a most suitable TFT LCD display module for your application. Please find the check list below to see if you can find a right fit.

Resolution will decide the clearance. Nobody likes to see a display showing pixel clearly. That is the reason for better resolution, going from QVGA, VGA to HD, FHD, 4K, 8K. But higher resolution means higher cost, power consumption, memory size, data transfer speed etc. Orient Display offers low resolution of 128×128 to HD, FHD, we are working on providing 4K for our customers. For full list of resolution available, please see Introduction: LCD Resolution

TFT screen brightness selection is very important. You don’t want to be frustrated by LCD image washout under bright light or you drain the battery too fast by selecting a super brightness LCD but will be used indoor only. There are general guidance listed in the table below.

Orient Display offers standard brightness, medium brightness , high brightness, and high end sunlight readable IPS TFT LCD display products for our customers to choose from.

If the budget is tight, TN type TFT LCD can be chosen but there is viewing angle selection of either 6 o’clock or 12 o’clock. Gray scale inversion needs to be taken of carefully. If a high-end product is designed, you can pay premium to select IPS TFT LCD which doesn’t have the viewing angle issue.

It is similar to viewing angle selection, TN type TFT LCD has lower contrast but lower cost, while IPS TFT LCD has much high contrast but normally with higher cost. Orient Display provides both selections.

Normal TFT LCD displays provide wide enoughtemperature range for most of the applications. -20 to 70oC. But there are some (always) outdoor applications like -30 to 80oC or even wider, special liquid crystal fluid has to be used. Heater is needed for operating temperature requirement of -40oC. Normally, storage temperature is not an issue, many of Orient Display standard TFT display can handle -40 to 85oC, if you have any questions, feel free to contact our engineers for details.

Power consideration can be critical in some hand-held devices. For a TFT LCD display module, backlight normally consumes more power than other part of the display. Dimming or totally shutdown backlight technology has to be used when not in use. For some extreme power sensitive application, sleep mode or even using memory on controller consideration has to be in design. Feel free to contact our engineers for details.

High Level Interfaces: Orient Display has technologies to make more advanced interfaces which are more convenient to non-display engineers, such as RS232, RS485, USB, VGA, HDMI etc. more information can be found in our serious products. TFT modules, Arduino TFT display, Raspberry Pi TFT display, Control Board.

If you can’t find a very suitable TFT LCD Display in our product line, don’t be discouraged. The products listed on our website is only small part of standard products. We have thousands of standard products in our database, feel free to contact our engineers for details.

If you like to have a special display, Orient Display is always flexible to do partial custom solution. For example, to modify the FPC to different length or shape, or use as fewer pinouts as possible, or design an ultra-bright LCD display, or a cover lens with your company logo on it, or design an extreme low power or low cost TFT display etc. our engineers will help you to achieve the goals. The NER cost can start from hundreds of dollars to Thousands. In rare case, it can be tens of thousands of dollars.

A fully custom TFT LCD panel can have very high NRE cost. Depending on the size of the display, quantity and which generation production line to be used. The tooling cost can start from $100,000 to over $1M.

The display industry is continuing to move toward mid-to-large-size, immersive displays in high-performance tablets, notebooks and 8K TVs. As these trends become industry standards, the oxide market emerges as an important opportunity for enabling the next-generation of high-performance displays. These displays feature: higher resolution and faster refresh rates; enhanced circuitry integration to achieve slim bezels; and cost savings for panel makers by improving the panel aperture ratio and enabling large gen size manufacturing.

To achieve these technical requirements, new breakthroughs are needed in thin-film-transistor (TFT) technologies. Among the display industry’s current offerings, amorphous silicon TFT (a-Si TFT) maintains a leading position among all applications, while low-temperature poly-silicon TFT (LTPS) is the predominant display technology for enabling high-performance handheld displays. The key differences between a-Si and LTPS are that an a-Si TFT has a simpler process, structure, and is easier to scale up in terms of manufacturing. However, LTPS offers better TFT performance to achieve higher resolutions and lower power consumption. The drawbacks of LTPS come in size limitations and increased manufacturing costs. For these reasons, neither a-Si or LTPS can fully meet the technical requirements for this next generation of high-performance displays.

All of these industry requirements create new process and glass composition challenges, which present the need to develop an advanced oxide TFT glass technology.

For decades, the dominant technology for flat panel displays was an amorphous silicon (a-Si) backplane. The vast majority of displays were made using a-Si backplanes due to the simplicity in manufacturing process, good economics, and scalability to larger sizes. As demands for brighter and/or higher resolution displays grew due to the introduction and proliferation of handheld mobile devices, alternative backplane technologies, such as low temperature polysilicon (LTPS), became more prevalent. LTPS is similar to a-Si, but requires higher processing temperatures and a more complicated manufacturing process. This results in advanced properties for the backplane, such as >50X higher electronic mobility. These properties allow smaller TFTs (enabling higher resolutions and brighter displays) and faster refresh rates. While clearly a superior technology to a-Si, the higher temperatures and more complex manufacturing process make LTPS considerably more expensive than a-Si. Additionally, LTPS is not easily scaled to larger sizes to enable better panel economics.

The ideal backplane technology would combine the simplicity, economics, and scalability to larger panel sizes of a-Si with the heightened performance of LTPS. This is exactly what oxide TFT technologies offer. The most commonly implemented oxide TFT technology is based on Indium-Gallium-Zinc-Oxide or “IGZO” technologies.

Though the mobility of oxide TFT is not as high as LTPS, it is an order of magnitude better than a-Si technology and capable of driving OLED displays and 8K 120Hz + LCD TVs. Additionally, the low off-current of an oxide TFT could enable low refresh frequency without flicker effects on static images (a comparison of different TFT technologies are shown in Table 1). While, like LTPS, oxide TFT backplanes have improved electrical properties relative to a-Si backplanes, oxide TFT backplanes can scale up to Gen 10.5 at reasonable costs (unlike LTPS), thereby enabling high-end, large-size LCD and OLED TVs. It is for this “just right” compromise of a-Si and LTPS properties that oxide TFT is garnering so much attention from panel makers worldwide. It offers the ability to manufacture displays far superior to a-Si at sizes and costs unachievable by LTPS.

There are two major oxide TFT processes to consider: etch-stop and back channel etch (BCE). The key difference between the processes is the use of an etch-stop layer, also known as ESL, that is required to protect the IGZO channels during the etching process.

Oxide TFT reliability was the major concern in early stage of oxide TFT development. The oxide TFT channel was usually damaged in subsequent processes, so an etch stop structure was designed to protect the oxide TFT channel. The etch-stop (ESL) oxide TFT manufacturing process begins with a bottom gate structure which is covered by a gate insulator and TFT islands. After the gate insulator (GI) layers and TFT patterning, a patterned SiO2 layer is deposited to cover the IGZO channel area in order to protect oxide TFT from following source/drain (S/D) etching. This enables better TFT reliability, and after the S/D etching, then followed by passivation, ITO layer as the Figure 1 shows. In the ESL process, temperatures may go up to 300-400°C for up to an hour or more. While these are higher temperatures than some a-Si processes, it is considerably lower than the typical LTPS processes that can exceed 500°C.

The BCE oxide TFT process (Figure 2) is very similar to the ESL oxide TFT process in the first two photo etching processes (PEP) steps. However, a high temperature (400-500°C) annealing process enhances the TFT reliability that allows the removal of the ESL. The higher temperature annealing step requires a thermally stable glass that can withstand harsh manufacturing environments and processing times relative to the conventional oxide (ESL) or a-Si processes.

To panel makers, the BCE oxide TFT process is similar to the a-Si process, which has been widely used for the past two decades. Also, there is one photo-mask process reduction compared to the ES oxide TFT process, therefore, BCE oxide TFT is becoming a mainstream process of oxide TFT manufacturing.

While the oxide TFT process has clear technical benefits for the manufacture of large and high-performance TVs, it presents a unique set of challenges for the glass substrate used in the process.

When put through a typical TFT backplane process, glass substrates will change shape or size (i.e., strain) which is called a change in total pitch (TP). One of the most important glass substrate attributes is total pitch variation (TPV), which is the deviation from predictable glass movement within a glass sheet and from sheet-to-sheet. For a glass substrate to have good TPV performance, the substrate must have the required balance of physical properties to resist the various causes of strain of the substrate: elastic distortion, stress relaxation, and compaction. These sources of strain, and the corresponding glass property that resists them, are discussed below.

In TFT processes, there are several sources of stress applied to the glass substrate, such as film stresses and gate metals. In oxide TFT, the latter is particularly significant due to the substantial thickness and covered area of the gate metal. The pitch change associated with these stresses is determined by the size of the stress, the elastic modulus of the glass, and the thickness of the substrate. Since the stresses are determined by the TFT manufacturer and the industry is continually driving to thinner and thinner substrates, the only attribute within the control of the glass manufacturer is to increase the elastic modulus to increase the stiffness of the substrate. Also, because the stresses in the TFT process can vary across a sheet or sheet-to-sheet, a higher elastic modulus will reduce the strain due to variations in the applied stresses, thereby minimizing TPV from this potential cause.

The stresses from applied films and gate metal can also contribute to the overall TPV through the relaxation of those stresses during subsequent thermal treatments. As the substrate progresses through the various steps of the TFT process, the films, gate metal, and substrate itself will all undergo stress relaxation. As the stress state of the composite changes with time and temperature, the concomitant strain will accordingly change, causing a pitch change and an increase in TPV. The glass substrate resists this stress relaxation in proportion to its effective viscosity at the process temperatures. In a-Si TFT processes, the temperatures are low enough that there is a minimal amount of stress relaxation due to the glass substrate having a relatively high viscosity at these low temperatures (the viscosity of the glass increases as the temperature decreases). In oxide TFT processing, however, temperatures are higher and, therefore, the potential for stress relaxation is greater due to the lower effective viscosity of the glass. This is particularly acute for the BCE oxide TFT process, which has process steps with temperatures in excess of 400°C. Traditional glass substrates which are sufficient for the typical a-Si applications may also be sufficient for the lower temperature ESL oxide TFT processes. However, the higher temperature BCE oxide TFT process may require a substrate with a higher effective viscosity at temperatures in the range of 400°C.

The effective viscosity of the glass substrate also plays a role in the amount of viscous relaxation the glass substrate undergoes in the TFT process due to structural relaxation of the glass itself. This is commonly referred to as “compaction” or “shrinkage” in the glass industry. Compaction is due to the evolution of the glass structure from a non-equilibrium state toward a structure closer to equilibrium with the customer process. The amount of this viscous relaxation that occurs is proportional to the degree to which the glass is out of equilibrium, and inversely proportional to the effective viscosity of the glass at the TFT process temperatures. Consequently, a higher viscosity glass is beneficial for minimizing TPV, just like in stress relaxation. In glass property terms, a higher viscosity glass is a glass with a higher “annealing point” therefore glass manufacturers will often tout the high annealing point of their glass compositions.

Corning’s proprietary fusion process manufactures glass panels at Gen 10.5 sizes (2940 x 3370mm), enabling higher glass utilization for larger-screen sizes. For example, one sheet of Gen 10.5 glass could create eight 65” display panels, or six 75” display panels. This enhanced glass utilization greatly reduces cost for panel makers and is key for enabling the oxide TFT market"

For oxide TFT to be used in IT or handheld products, one of the key features is a thin and light form factor. To achieve this, the display panel usually needs to be thinned down to roughly 0.15mm / 0.15mm (for the two pieces of glass in the display) using the chemical slimming process. A faster etch rate is clearly desired to enable higher throughput and lower costs but this often comes at the cost of the generation of “sludge.” Sludge can create problems in the etch vendors’ processes and end up causing more cost than the fast etch rate reduced. By using a glass that balances maximizing etch rate while minimizing sludge generation, panel makers optimize their throughput and costs.

The technology challenges and technical requirements outlined fuel an industry need for a new glass substrate with the right balance of physical properties for oxide TFT technology. For displays applications, this includes low total pitch variation, low total thickness variation, and low sag. This package of glass attributes, alongside the ability to scale-up manufacturing to large-gen sizes, will help enable the next-generation of mid-to-large-size, immersive displays in 8K TVs.

These applications require a shift toward oxide technology, versus the current a-Si and LTPS TFT technologies. As the push for oxide increases, new process and technical challenges emerge for panel makers. To build a display that meets these performance expectations, panel makers require a thermally and dimensionally stable glass to improve yields while achieving the desired resolution.