What They Say
The Elec reports that Samsung Display (SDC) and Ulvac have different views over the likely price for a deposition machine with SDC wanting to pay $307 million while Ulvac is said to want $540 to $615 million.
SDC has been considering building a G8.5 fab for some time, although a decision on the investment is still pending, the report said. This is bigger than any previous RGB OLED fab and will need a unique machine that performs vertical deposition. If it goes ahead, the fab would make 15K substrates per month, with a ‘half-cut’ process.
What We Think
If this project doesn’t go ahead, there will be a significant impact on the penetration of OLEDs into notebooks. However, if it doesn’t, Samsung could be giving LGD or someone in China (probably BOE) the chance to jump in, albeit at high risk.
Vertical deposition gets around some of the issues of sag in horizontal deposition. The idea has been around for a very long time (I first wrote about it two decades ago) and Ulvac is not the only company, with Canon Tokki as another supplier, although nobody has done this at G8 or above so far. We’ve been covering this topic for some time, now. (Samsung Display to use vertical deposition for Gen 8.5 IT OLED panels) (BR)
