Every day, new products, new experiences, professional membrane switch proofing factory, 12 hour expedited shipmentFrom the hot sale of Samsung Galaxy edge flagship series to the advent of various curved screen bracelets and TVs, it is no doubt that curved screen technology has been widely valued and sought after by consumers and the industry in recent years. In the future, with the continuous development and improvement of fixed curvature curved screen technology, the flexible touch screen that can realize arbitrary bending will become an important development direction. On the 25th, at the 13th International touch screen and display technology development forum, Huang Hanfeng, deputy general manager of touch R & D from Shenzhen oufeiguang technology, made a detailed introduction to the flexible touch screen from the perspective of the industrial chain around the four key elements of flexible display, flexible touch, flexible cover plate and flexible bonding.Flexible displayFor LCD display, the LCD is usually responsible for controlling the display gray, and the three primary color filters control the display color, which requires them to correspond one by one in order to display normally. If the LCD panel is used as a curved screen, the inner circumference and outer circumference will be unequal, and the original one-to-one corresponding liquid crystal and filter will have position deviation, resulting in color distortion. In addition, it will also cause a series of problems such as light leakage, dark screen ghosting and snowflakes. Therefore, for the curved screen, the OLED display technology represented by AMOLED has almost become the best choice.Huang Hanfeng said that at present, Samsung is the undisputed AMOLED overlord in terms of patents, production capacity, yield and technology accumulation. The sixth generation AMOLED panel that began mass production at the end of 2014 can now produce 50000 pieces per month, and the yield can reach 60%. The second is LG, but LG has been focusing on large screen curved TV. At present, with the increasingly obvious trend of small screen AMOLED, LG is also accelerating the layout of small and medium-sized flexible screens. Although its output is not as good as Samsung, its yield can also reach more than 60%. The latest release of Xiaomi note 2 is the flexible AMOLED screen of LG. In addition, Japan's JDI and sharp (already acquired by Hon Hai), Taiwan's Youda, domestic BOE, Rouyu and other screen manufacturers are also accelerating the layout of their own AMOLED technology. It is the general trend for AMOLED to replace LCD.Flexible touchIn terms of touch control, ITO (indium tin oxide) transparent conductive film has become the most important touch layer material for display screens such as non curved LCD and OLED due to its good light transmittance, low thickness, excellent hardness and conductivity, mature manufacturing technology and many other reasons. However, as ITO itself is a brittle material, it is not suitable for making flexible touch layer with large curvature or even free bending, and the cost and cost are high. At present, it accounts for about 30% - 40% of the cost of the upstream material part of the whole touch screen industry, and uses "indium", a rare metal with limited reserves. Therefore, with the advent of the era of curved surface and flexibility, it is likely to be replaced.Huang Hanfeng said that at present, the main substitutes for ITO materials are graphene, carbon nanotubes, nano silver and metal mesh. Graphene and carbon nanotubes are very good substitutes for ITO from the characteristics of the material itself. However, graphene is still in the R & D stage and is still far from mass production. The industrial mass production technology of carbon nanotubes is not perfect, and the conductivity of the thin film products made of carbon nanotubes is not as good as that of ITO. Therefore, from the perspective of technology and marketization, metal grid and nano silver technology will be the protagonists of development in recent years. Metal grid technology has been applied in some PC display markets.The metal mesh technology mentioned here is a conductive metal mesh formed by pressing metal conductive materials such as silver and copper or oxides on thin film substrates such as pet. Its main advantages are low raw material cost and good folding ability. However, due to the problem of Murray interference ripple caused by yield, output and high-speed pixels, it is more suitable for desktop all-in-one computers, laptops, televisions and other products with low resolution and relatively long-distance use.Nano silver technology means that nano silver ink material is coated on pet or glass substrate, and then laser lithography is used to depict the conductive network of nano silver wire. Its main advantages are high yield, small linewidth, good conductivity and folding resistance, while its disadvantage is high cost. Moreover, compared with metal mesh, nano silver material has smaller radius of curvature and small resistance change rate during bending. In addition, due to the linewidth, it is more suitable for high-resolution close-up scenes such as mobile phones, smart watches and bracelets."By comprehensive comparison, I think nano silver has more advantages than metal grid," Huang Hanfeng said.Flexible cover plateIn order to bend at will, in addition to solving the flexible display and flexible touch, the last and most critical part is the flexible cover plate and fitting. However, due to its hard and fragile characteristics, glass cover plate is not the best choice in the field of flexibility.Huang Hanfeng said that compared with glass, pet and PI (polyimide) materials with high surface hardness and high light transmittance are better choices, but at present, pet and PI also have many problems to be solved. On the one hand, they are not resistant to high temperature and have poor light transmittance: pet and PI will have problems of partial melting and property change at low ambient temperature, and they do not have good light transmittance compared with glass.Secondly, it is difficult to achieve a balance between hardness and folding. Huang Hanfeng said that if you want to meet certain hardness requirements, you need to apply the hardened layer, but after coating the hardened layer, after repeated folding, the hardened layer will crack and reduce the hardness. Therefore, how to achieve a balance between the two is the biggest bottleneck at present.Compared with the flexible cover plate that needs further development, the 3D glass cover plate necessary for curved screen mobile phones has a very good development prospect.Some data show that 2018 may become the outbreak year of 3D glass cover plate. It is expected that the mobile phone penetration rate of 3D glass cover plate will exceed 50% around 2020. With the maturity of 3D glass cover plate processing technology and the decline of unit price, the penetration rate will further improve. It is expected that the market scale will reach more than 19 billion yuan in the future.Huang Hanfeng said that the common manufacturing processes of 1R (single radian bending) and 2R cover plates have been basically mature. They basically achieve a bending effect through hot bending technology. The difference is mainly in the coating of hardened layer. However, the yield is a problem to be solved, which is basically only 30%, and there is no room for improvement in the short term. If 4R is to be done in the future, the yield will be lower. Therefore, the yield is one of the urgent problems to be solved in the manufacture of cover plate.Flexible fitAfter the cover plate is selected, it is fitted, that is, the cover plate is integrated with the touch and display layer below to form a complete module. At present, there are two common methods: roller type and vacuum bonding: the roller has high efficiency and needs to roll the pasted object. The efficiency of vacuum type is relatively low, but it does not need to roll the pasted object, so it is not easy to cause damage to the pasted object.Huang Hanfeng said that if the curvature is large, you can only choose vacuum bonding. However, for the possible 4R bonding in the future, due to its special four side bending characteristics, it is difficult to avoid wrinkles and bubbles in places with large radians even if vacuum is adopted. At present, the industry has adopted customized extrusion airbags or plastic parts to alleviate this problem, but it has not been completely solved. Therefore, the industry still has room for progress in multi surface and high curvature fitting technology.Huang Hanfeng frankly said: "from the perspective of the supply chain, it will take several years for the flexible screen to really realize mass production. At the same time, it also needs the upstream and downstream supply chain to jointly overcome the relevant technical problems."For future development, Huang Hanfeng believes that the integration of various modules will be the general trend. He said: "in the incell technology of LCD, ITO touch film and liquid crystal layer are integrated together, which is a good integration. Now the fingerprint module is independent, and it can also be integrated with touch in the future. I think there will be a process of mutual integration and progress between functional modules in the future."
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