According to the Nikkei Asian Review website Screen Holdings is reported to be entering the business of building production machines for manufacturing OLED panels, in response to growing production of such panels for smartphones in Japan, China and South Korea.
The Kyoto-based company has, until recently, only made and sold production equipment for pilot lines. The company has now moved beyond pilots and has developed equipment compatible with Gen-6 substrates (1500 mm x 1850mm), and has, since April, begun supplying them for panel mass production.
Screen's systems are used for coating polyimide, plastic that forms the substrate for OLED panels. The company's equipment can uniformly coat Gen-6 substrates to a thickness of 10 microns in less than 120 seconds.
In addition, these machines prevent foreign bodies and bubbles appearing across the substrate, and have a defect ratio of less than 10%. They also reduce cleaning costs - which the report says can run around 20 million yen (US$183,000) a month - by half, enabling smartphone panels to be produced more at lower costs.
This is a new product category for Screen and has grown from the company's main business of systems for producing LCD panels and semiconductors. It has improved nozzles for coating substrates and made them usable even with highly viscous OLED liquids.