Taiwanese flat-panel makers AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電) and Chimei Innolux Corp (奇美電子) are lagging behind their Japanese and South Korean rivals when it comes to the thinner touch-panel technology which is often used in high-end smartphones, a Taipei-based analyst said recently.
Japan’s Sony Mobile Display began mass production of in-cell touch panels in February, IHS Displaybank senior analyst Stone Wu (吳善同) said.
Two other Japanese panel suppliers — Sharp Corp and Toshiba Mobile Display — and LG Display Co of South Korea have also been tapping into Apple Inc’s next-generation iPhone 5 panel supply chain, with the three companies scheduled to start mass production of the smartphone panels before the end of this month, he said.
Similar products made by AUO will not begin mass production until the third or fourth quarter, while Chimei Innolux will not produce any in-cell touch panels this year, Wu said.
“The yield on in-cell panels remains a key issue for most suppliers,” he told reporters in an interview.
“Even for those companies that start mass production in May, they can only reach an average yield of 65 to 70 percent at present,” Wu said, adding that the yield on touch panels used in Apple’s iPhone 4S was about 80 to 85 percent.
Compared with other technologies, touch panels that use in-cell technology can be made thinner because the touch sensors are placed inside color filters rather than on top of them.
The technology will largely be used in high-end smartphones, rather than mid-range and entry-level models, given the higher associated manufacturing cost, Wu said, adding that in-cell panels cost about 20 percent more than high-quality in-plane switching (IPS) panels which are currently used in premium smartphones and tablet computers.
In February, AU Optronics told investors it had completed research and development of in-cell panels and would start product design with customers in the second half of the year.
Wu said AU Optronics’ potential customers will likely be phone makers — possibly Taiwanese — because improving yields on in-cell touch panels measuring less than 5 inches is easier.
IHS Displaybank forecast that touch panel shipments would reach 1.24 billion units this year, up 27.6 percent from the 968 million units shipped last year.
In terms of technology, projected capacitive touch panels will remain the mainstream, accounting for 69.5 percent and 77.2 percent of total touch panel shipments this year and next year respectively, the research firm said.
With the speed cryptocurrency is emerging as the millennial generation’s alternative asset of choice in India, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago a couple of blockchain pioneers were briefly in police custody. Sathvik Vishwanath and Harish BV, cofounders of a then five-year-old start-up, were arrested in late 2018. No, they had not pulled off a shady initial coin offering. Their “crime” was that they put up a kiosk in a mall in Bangalore where customers could swap bitcoin, ether or ripple for cash or vice versa. That was the whole point of unocoin, their crypto token exchange.
A Chinese factory owned by South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix Inc yesterday halted operations after a plant worker was found to have an asymptomatic infection of COVID-19, Xinhua news agency reported. The South Korean worker based at the plant in Chongqing since February had departed on Thursday for South Korea, Xinhua reported. He was tested at Incheon Airport in Seoul and confirmed positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, it reported. All factory staff as well as staff and recent guests at the hotel where the worker lived have been isolated and given nucleic acid tests, the agency said. “We’re cooperating with the local government
FIVE NEW FABS: An acquisition of Siltronic would boost GlobalWafers’ market share from 17 to 30 percent, easily surpassing Japanese rival Sumco’s 25 percent GlobalWafers Inc (環球晶圓) yesterday said it is in final talks to acquire Germany-based Siltronic AG in a 3.75 billion euro (US$4.5 billion) deal, which might help it compete with its closest rival Sumco Corp of Japan. The acquisition would be the fifth for GlobalWafers since 2008, as it has grown to become the world’s No. 3 supplier of silicon wafers through such deals. GlobalWafers, which has a 17 percent market share, would see its market position greatly elevated to 30 percent when combined with Siltronic’s 13 percent, according to a presentation Siltronic gave to its investors at a quarterly conference in August. Sumco
A year of crisis for the lira has kept people in Turkey buying gold at a record pace. Now the appetite for more bullion risks becoming a drag on the currency just as a rally struggles to regain momentum. In the two weeks after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cleared out the leadership ranks blamed for failing to stabilize the lira and draining reserves, Turkish retail investors and firms added US$2.2 billion to their gold holdings, taking them to US$36.4 billion, or almost triple the total last year, Turkish central bank data showed. People are not relenting in their zeal to own
RSS