First, we helped enable a significant improvement in display performance with a new kind of transistor called low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS). While LTPS manufacturing was more complex than the previous incumbent technique, it enables higher OLED pixel density and thereby resolution. Because OLED materials are fragile, we adapted our CVD technology for OLED thin-film encapsulation, which hermetically seals and protects the OLED films from any exposure to air and moisture.

These technology adaptations helped catalyze OLED adoption in smartphones, the largest-selling consumer electronics product category. The higher materials engineering intensity of OLED displays created a new wave of factory and equipment spending, which added to Applied’s display revenue and helped the company become the world’s largest display equipment manufacturer with leadership positions in its target market segments.

In recent years, while the display industry has been in a correction period, we have continued to invest to solidify our technology leadership and strengthen our core products in CVD, PVD, thin-film encapsulation and eBeam testing and review. We also adopted another concept from our semiconductor business: the Integrated Materials Solution™ approach, where we combine multiple adjacent process steps in a single, high-vacuum system to protect and carefully engineer interfaces between ever-thinner layers of materials. This “fab within a fab” approach is helping our display customers develop new generations of faster transistors that use less power, paving the way for more exciting consumer electronics devices in the years ahead.

Innovating for the Next Wave of Growth

The past 30 years of display innovation was about transitioning from CRT to LCD, scaling up thin displays from the smallest notebook PCs to the largest TVs, and giving high-end smartphones the best display technology of all. Today, the display industry is on the cusp of another major inflection: expanding OLED penetration to the hundreds of millions of tablets, notebook PCs and IT monitors sold each year. Once it becomes practical to scale OLED manufacturing to the larger glass panels used to build these displays, consumers can look forward to brighter displays with wider viewing angles; higher resolution and refresh rates; thinner and even flexible screens; and lower power and longer battery life. 

Bringing OLED technology to these IT devices represents a massive opportunity for the display industry since the number of LCD units sold each year multiplied by the larger screen area of these devices represents a display area opportunity several times larger than smartphones. 

Accelerating OLED adoption in these end markets could require billions of dollars in new fab equipment spending. Converting the TV market to OLED technology would require another massive investment in new display manufacturing capacity and many years of high-volume production.

As we embark on the next 30 years of our journey, Applied is focusing on new ways to use our materials engineering and high-volume manufacturing know-how to bring more exciting innovations to the display industry, which will be even more dynamic in the decades ahead.