Flat Panel Display Manufacturers

Vacuum processing is employed in the manufacture of all flat panel displays ranging from Liquid Crystal Displays and Plasma Display Panels to Organic Light Emitting Diode displays. The most common flat panel technology used today employs processes similar to those used to fabricate microchip semiconductors. Flat Panel Displays can be found in computer monitors, TV’s, cell phones, PDA’s, digital cameras and other electronic devices. Vacuum processing is used to manufacture all flat panel displays just like it was for CRT TV’s. This includes Plasma Display Panels (PDP) used for large screen TV’s, Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) which have replaced CRT displays in most applications and Organic Light Emitting Diode displays (OLED) which are used in a variety of applications such as cell phone displays and digital cameras.

Some of the common vacuum flat panel processes include:

• Active Matrix Thin Film Transistor LCD (AM-TFT-LCD) – similar to manufacturing transistor switches and capacitors except it uses a glass substrate instead of silicon wafers.
• Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) – high temperature vacuum evaporation/condensation to put a vaporized form of the desired sputtering material onto the surface.
• Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) – deposits thin films from a vapor state using chemical reactions caused by the creation of a plasma between reacting gases.