Integrated Digital Technologies Inc (劍揚光學) said yesterday that it will start mass production of embedded solar cells in liquid-crystal-display (LCD) panels by the end of this year because of the increased popularity of panels known as interactive screens (iScreen).
The company said it would ship 5 million units of iScreen panels by next year, grabbing a global market share of 20 percent, Naejye Hwang (黃乃傑), Integrated Digital’s display division director, told a press conference.
“Unlike other touch screen panels that have extra film or glass with photo sensors on top of the regular LCD panel, Integrated Digital embeds solar cells in the thin-film-transistor [TFT] array layer during the panel-making process, thereby reducing the weight and thickness of the final product,” Hwang said.
This can save up to 30 percent of manufacturing costs because it reduces the need for additional film or glass components as well as additional labor, company founder and chief executive officer Hwang Huey-liang (黃惠良) said.
The company said the iScreen could be used on PCs, while its applications ranged from gaming, interactive Excel, Picasa, Google Earth as well as AtutoCAD and other drawing software. It said iScreens use less power and have an extended lifetime and unique remote control and writing capabilities.
The company will display its technology at Computex Taipei, which opens on Tuesday and closes on June 6 at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall I.
Meanwhile, VMAX Telecom Co (威邁思電信) will provide high-speed wireless Internet service on the MRT Muzha Line as part of its program for Computex Taipei.
It said WiMAX would be the main theme of this year’s show, using the slogan: “WiMAX on the Move.”
“There will be a more diverse display of [WiMAX] products and many are equipped with built-in WiMAX chips,” said Enoch Du (杜全昌), secretary-general of the Taipei Computer Association (TCA, 台北市電腦公會).
“This year, the entire [WiMAX] industry is expected to reach a growth rate of 50 percent and the output value will exceed NT$10 billion by the end of this year,” Du said.
Michael Chen (陳武宏), director of Intel Asia-Pacific Embedded Sales Group, said WiMAX has proved to be an economic and efficient broadband network.
Intel projected that the number of WiMAX subscribers worldwide could nearly double to 800 million by the end of next year, from 430 million at present, Chen said.
On April 27, Tatung InfoComm Co (大同電信) became the first company in Taiwan to launch its WiMAX service in Penghu.
Five more WiMAX operators are expected to launch commercial services in the second half of this year, Du said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS