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.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS