IHS said that revenues for display driver ICs will peak at $6.8 billion in 2017, due mainly to the demand for higher resolution displays in smartphones and other applications. Smartphones boasting full high-definition (FHD) and 4K-resolution displays are on the rise, which is contributing significantly to the increase in driver IC revenue.
“To increase revenues panel makers are trying to reduce the number of driver ICs in their displays,” said Tadashi Uno, senior analyst and researcher for IHS Technology. “One way is to use driver ICs with more pins. While in the past the most popular source driver had 720 pins, the latest driver ICs have more than 1000 pins, which drives down the number of driver ICs needed for each display.”
Source:IHS
The driver IC supply chain is unique, according to the IHS Display Driver IC Market Tracker. Most driver IC makers are “fabless” companies that contract out their production to companies including TSMC and UMC rather than owning their own factories. Due to increased competition in the market, prices and profits for driver ICs dropped dramatically after 2007, so foundry makers have de-prioritized driver IC production.
“The lead time from order to delivery in the driver IC market is around three months,” Uno said. “This timeframe is quite long, compared to other materials and components; however, driver IC order delivery and pricing are not affected by the usual supply-and-demand forces.”
Analyst Comment
Separately, Digitimes reported that TSMC and other foundries are pushing driver companies to switch to 300mm wafers so that production on 200mm wafers can be more diversified. The report said that most of its 200mm wafer capacity is taken by display drivers. (BR)
High-resolution displays are directly related to the amount of driver ICs that are shipped, Uno told us. He gave an example. Every panel has three channels for the X resolution, due to the three sub-pixels (red, green and blue); this means that panel with 1920 x 1080 resolution requires 5,760 channels for the X resolution. This can be filled by using six source driver chips with 960 pins each. The Y resolution (1080) could be filled by two gate driver chips with 560 pins each – so eight chips in total. An UltraHD display using the same chips would double that figure, for a total of 16 ICs. (TA)
