ito lcd panel price

NDSsi uses only “Grade A” LCD panels in all of its products, while many competitors use “Grade B” panels in order to save cost, and as a result compromise quality. In medical applications, it is important not to compromise the quality of the displayed image since it is often the basis for making clinical decisions. The following tables and images show the differences between “Grade A” and “Grade B” LCD panels in terms of different types of allowable defects.

There are essentially two different types of pixel defects, bright (stuck pixels) and dark (dead pixels).The table and images below show the differences between Grade A and Grade B LCD panels in terms of allowable pixel defects.

(Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co, Sharp Corp and five other makers of liquid crystal displays agreed to pay more than $553 million to settle consumer and state regulatory claims that they conspired to fix prices for LCD panels in televisions, notebook computers and monitors.A worker prepares a display of Sharp flat panel televisions for the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7, 2009. REUTERS/Steve Marcus

The settlement is the latest arising from lawsuits alleging the creation of an international cartel designed to illegally inflate prices and stifle competition in LCD panels between 1999 and 2006, affecting billions of dollars of U.S. commerce.

In December 2006, authorities in Japan, Korea, the European Union and the United States revealed a probe into alleged anti-competitive activity among LCD panel manufacturers. Many companies and executives have since pleaded guilty to criminal antitrust violations and paid more than $890 million in fines.

The latest payout includes $538.6 million to resolve claims by “indirect” purchasers that bought televisions and computers with thin film transistor LCDs, as well as claims by eight states: Arkansas, California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, New York, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Other defendants have yet to settle, including Taiwan-based AU Optronics Corp, one of the largest LCD panel manufacturers; South Korea’s LG Display Co and Toshiba Corp.

The accord follows a settlement this month by eight companies, including Samsung and Sharp, to pay $388 million to settle litigation by direct purchasers of the LCD panels.

Flat-panel displays are thin panels of glass or plastic used for electronically displaying text, images, or video. Liquid crystal displays (LCD), OLED (organic light emitting diode) and microLED displays are not quite the same; since LCD uses a liquid crystal that reacts to an electric current blocking light or allowing it to pass through the panel, whereas OLED/microLED displays consist of electroluminescent organic/inorganic materials that generate light when a current is passed through the material. LCD, OLED and microLED displays are driven using LTPS, IGZO, LTPO, and A-Si TFT transistor technologies as their backplane using ITO to supply current to the transistors and in turn to the liquid crystal or electroluminescent material. Segment and passive OLED and LCD displays do not use a backplane but use indium tin oxide (ITO), a transparent conductive material, to pass current to the electroluminescent material or liquid crystal. In LCDs, there is an even layer of liquid crystal throughout the panel whereas an OLED display has the electroluminescent material only where it is meant to light up. OLEDs, LCDs and microLEDs can be made flexible and transparent, but LCDs require a backlight because they cannot emit light on their own like OLEDs and microLEDs.

Liquid-crystal display (or LCD) is a thin, flat panel used for electronically displaying information such as text, images, and moving pictures. They are usually made of glass but they can also be made out of plastic. Some manufacturers make transparent LCD panels and special sequential color segment LCDs that have higher than usual refresh rates and an RGB backlight. The backlight is synchronized with the display so that the colors will show up as needed. The list of LCD manufacturers:

Organic light emitting diode (or OLED displays) is a thin, flat panel made of glass or plastic used for electronically displaying information such as text, images, and moving pictures. OLED panels can also take the shape of a light panel, where red, green and blue light emitting materials are stacked to create a white light panel. OLED displays can also be made transparent and/or flexible and these transparent panels are available on the market and are widely used in smartphones with under-display optical fingerprint sensors. LCD and OLED displays are available in different shapes, the most prominent of which is a circular display, which is used in smartwatches. The list of OLED display manufacturers:

MicroLED displays is an emerging flat-panel display technology consisting of arrays of microscopic LEDs forming the individual pixel elements. Like OLED, microLED offers infinite contrast ratio, but unlike OLED, microLED is immune to screen burn-in, and consumes less power while having higher light output, as it uses LEDs instead of organic electroluminescent materials, The list of MicroLED display manufacturers:

LCDs are made in a glass substrate. For OLED, the substrate can also be plastic. The size of the substrates are specified in generations, with each generation using a larger substrate. For example, a 4th generation substrate is larger in size than a 3rd generation substrate. A larger substrate allows for more panels to be cut from a single substrate, or for larger panels to be made, akin to increasing wafer sizes in the semiconductor industry.

"Samsung Display has halted local Gen-8 LCD lines: sources". THE ELEC, Korea Electronics Industry Media. August 16, 2019. Archived from the original on April 3, 2020. Retrieved December 18, 2019.

"TCL to Build World"s Largest Gen 11 LCD Panel Factory". www.businesswire.com. May 19, 2016. Archived from the original on April 2, 2018. Retrieved April 1, 2018.

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"TCL"s Panel Manufacturer CSOT Commences Production of High Generation Panel Modules". www.businesswire.com. June 14, 2018. Archived from the original on June 30, 2019. Retrieved June 30, 2019.

"Samsung Display Considering Halting Some LCD Production Lines". 비즈니스코리아 - BusinessKorea. August 16, 2019. Archived from the original on April 5, 2020. Retrieved December 19, 2019.

Herald, The Korea (July 6, 2016). "Samsung Display accelerates transition from LCD to OLED". www.koreaherald.com. Archived from the original on April 1, 2018. Retrieved April 1, 2018.

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Indium Tin Oxide, or ITO, is a key material for making displays.  It is a transparent conductive material that applies voltage to the clear aperture in the LCD and provides the transparent electrodes for touch screens as well.  Alternative solutions by a number of companies are in development, and these are now seeing success in the market.  In fact, their success is already starting to impact the cost and adoption of ITO in a range of applications beyond just displays.  According to a new report from Nanomarkets (Transparent Conductor Markets: 2014-2021), revenue from ITO sales will increase for a few more years before leveling off and then declining (see figure below).

The manufacture of ITO (as opposed to the mining of Indium)  is still a strong Japanese industry with Nitto Denko being the dominant player.  About a year ago, Nitto Denko lowered the prices of ITO by around 20% in a strategic move to fend off alternatives.

But measuring the advantage of an alternative vs. ITO is complex.  Panel makers can buy ITO material, sputtering targets, or ITO sputtered on plastic or glass substrates.  Alternatives can be delivered as films or solution processed.  So while the alternative raw materials may not be much less expensive than ITO, the processing may be less expensive.  But the choice of when and when not to consider an alternative is also very dependent on the application and needed performance.

The alternatives to ITO encompass a range of technologies including carbon nanotube films, nanowire-based transparent conductors, metal meshes and conducting polymers.  In general, non-ITO developers will point to three main advantages vs. ITO:

As mentioned, lower cost really needs to be evaluated at the display level on an apples-to-apples basis that includes processing and yield issues as well.  Here, Jackson says any benefit must be proven in high volume production – an area where ITO has a decades-long track record.

Firms selling alternatives to ITO remain heavily focused on opportunities in the touch-screen business but are also looking for new opportunities, says Nanomarkets.  One new trend in the touch space is the move to use alternative approaches to adding touch to larger panels.  Success in this area may not only put them at a competitive advantage, but also increases the addressable market for transparent conductors as a whole.

For example, large touch screens have tended to be based on technologies such as infrared.  At Display Week, CimeNanotech  showed a 42” touch screen prototype with a company called Amdolla that offered a very fast 150Hz touchscreen refresh rate.  This fast rate is possible in smaller screens but not usually in larger screens, but the low sheet resistance now makes this possible.  At the recent Touch Taiwan 2014, Heraeus showed a 55-inch touch screen developed by Taiwan-based Inputek that uses the Heraeus Clevios PEDOT conductive polymer for the projected capacitive touch panel with 10 sensor points.

According the Nanomarkets analyst Lawrence Gasman, there has not been a lot of focus by the alternative companies to look at replacing ITO in the LCD glass panel fabs, where it is used to deliver voltage to the LCD material under the clear aperture.  However, he notes that these display companies are seeing how alternatives are used in touch panels and how this might be a good time to consider their use in the fab as they develop in-cell and on-cell touch screen methods that bring this touch screen part back into the LCD panel fab facility.

“The use of alternatives might make sense for a new fab investment or for production of target display types like passive matrix LCDs”, says Gasman, “but it seems unlikely that existing fabs will be retrofitted simply to replace ITO”.

But Gasman also sees OLED lighting as an interesting area where alternatives might have a more level playing field to compete in.  Gasman noted that Konica Minolta has started production at an OLED lighting factory and is producing 1M panels per month for general lighting applications.  “They are still using ITO, but this suggests the market is maturing and a potential opportunity”. concluded Gasman.  “The solar and automotive markets are also interesting”.

The chart below from Nanomarkets shows the total market for transparent conductive materials (ITO and alternatives).  Since ITO will peak and decline, the growth of the market will be in alternative materials.

In this study, indium-tin-oxide (ITO) nanoparticles were simply recovered from the thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panel scraps by means of lift-off method. This can be done by dissolving color filter (CF) layer which is located between ITO layer and glass substrate. In this way the ITO layer was easily lifted off the glass substrate of the panel scrap without panel crushing. Over 90% of the ITO on the TFT-LCD panel was recovered by using this method. After separating, the ITO was obtained as particle form and their characteristics were investigated. The recovered product appeared as aggregates of particles less than 100 nm in size. The weight ratio of In/Sn is very close to 91/9. XRD analysis showed that the ITO nanoparticles have well crystallized structures with (222) preferred orientation even after recovery. The method described in this paper could be applied to the industrial recovery business for large size LCD scraps from TV easily without crushing the glass substrate.

Thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) has been used as a most popular flat panel display. As the TFT-LCD market grows, significant amount of rare material of indium (In) has been continuously consumed in the display manufacturing industry. Indium has been widely used for transparent conductive oxides (TCO) in the form of indium tin oxide (ITO), because it has unique high optical transparency and electrical conductivity. The In resource is quite limited, e.g., the world’s reserve is merely 16,000 tons while the current annual consumption is about 1400 tons [1]. Consequently, global In resources are being exhausted due to their fast consumption rate in information displays, solar cells and lighting [2,3]. Therefore, recycling of indium has become a very important issue these days. A lot of research works aimed at the reuse of In materials has been performed and, as an alternative, the recycling of In from old ITO targets has been studied [4]. However, only a few works aimed at the extraction of In from TFT-LCD panel scraps has been performed. Moreover, we could not find any result on recovery of ITO with the optimal composition ratio of In/Sn as 91/9, which is the characteristics composition of the TCO. Several works reported that In can be recovered by crushing TFT-LCD panel scraps followed by selective extraction. Acquisition of ITO from the TFT-LCD scrap with the optimal ratio is very valuable for cost saving by reducing the number of steps in the recovery process. In this study, a new recycling technology was developed to recover ITO nanoparticles from TFT-LCD scraps. It is called lift-off method because ITO layer is simply lifted off the glass substrate of panel scraps by dissolving color filter (CF) layer which is located between them as in Figure 1. Characteristics such as particle size, thermal property, crystal structure, composition ratio, and purity of the recovered ITO product were investigated.

Lift-off method for recovering indium-tin-oxide (ITO) as nanoparticles from glass substrate of thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) scraps.

An alkaline solution was received from D. Company (Seoul, Korea) and used as a dissolving agent for the color filter. The solution consists of mainly KOH and NaOH and its pH is about 13.4. Polycarbonate (PC) membrane (Iso pore) having 0.4 μm pore diameter was purchased from Milllipore and used as a filter. Methylene Chloride (extra pure grade, Daejung Chemical and Metals, Korea) was used to dissolve the PC membrane. Deionized (DI) water was used to wash out the sample after each step. ITO was taken from a 7 inch size TFT-LCD panel scraps. Disassembly of the TFT-LCDs was done according to previously published methods [5]. First, the upper and lower portions were separated by cutting the edge of the TFT-LCD panel scraps. After cutting, the two plates were easily separated by removing residual liquid crystal with acetone. The upper plate was dipped into the alkaline solution at 80 °C for 30 min. Then the ITO was separated from the glass substrate automatically and remained in the solution after taking the glass substrate out of the solution. The ITO precipitate in the solution was filtered and washed several times with D.I. water. Filter cake was dried in a convection oven at 60 °C for 1 h. Then the thermal behavior of the filter cake was analyzed by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential thermal analysis (DTA) were performed by using thermogravimetry/differential thermal analyzer (TG/DTA: Seiko Exstar 6000, Seico Inst., Japan). In this way, the heat-treatment temperature to burn out the organic components was determined. The particle size, crystal structure, composition ratio, and purity of the ITO was analyzed by means of high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM: 300 kV, JEOL, Japan), field-emission scanning microscope (FESEM: JSM-7000F, JEOL, Japan), X-ray diffractometer (XRD: Rigaku Rotaflex D/MAX System) with monochromatic Cu target (λ = 0.1541 nm), inductively coupled plasma (ICP, ICP Optima 43DV, Perkin Elmer, Waltham, MA, USA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS: VG Microtech ESCA2000), using Al Kα radiation as an exciting source. All binding energies (BE) were referenced to the C 1s peak at 284.6 eV.

Figure 2a shows the cross-sectional SEM image of 7 inch LCD upper plate taken from a car navigator. The thickness of ITO was observed as 170 nm. Figure 2b shows the simple recovery scheme. The upper plate was immersed into the alkaline solution. After 30 min, the colorless alkaline solution was changed to blue color. That means some parts of RGB pigments were dissolved. This solution was filtered with the polycarbonate (PC) membrane (pore size 0.4 µm).

The filter cake appeared as two parts, film shape part and granular part as in Figure 3a. In the part A, many of irregular film pieces were found. According to the energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) analysis as shown in Figure 3b its major component was indium. Therefore we estimated that these pieces came from ITO. The granular part B was quite different from the part A. The EDS analysis in Figure 3c shows the elemental components of the aggregate part are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, copper and magnesium etc. indicating this part came from color filter.

The specific analysis of ITO with EDS is very difficult because energy levels of indium and tin are too close to differentiate each other. Therefore, we studied the composition via XPS measurement. The XPS spectra of filter cake are shown in Figure 4. As shown in Figure 4a the peaks located at 444.6, and 452.2 eV corresponding to the In 3d5/2 and In 3d3/2 state, respectively. These are related to In3+ bonding state in the In2O3 [6,7,8,9,10]. Figure 4b shows that Sn 3d5/2 and Sn 3d3/2 peaks located at 486.6, 495.2 eV respectively. These binding energies indicate that the Sn is in the Sn4+ bonding state from SnO2 [7,10]. According to the XPS analysis, the binding energy of filter cake, part A, was in good agreement with a typical ITO. Therefore, it is concluded that the recovered sample was mostly consisted of ITO.

Most of the filter cake was collected by dissolving the filter with the filter cake with methylene chloride. After decanting the methylene chloride away, the residue was washed with same solvent several times. Thermal behavior of the residue was performed by using TG/DTA. As shown in Figure 5a, TG/DTA curves were obtained in the range of ambient temperature to 1000 °C at a heating rate of 10 °C·min−1 in air at atmospheric pressure. The first weight loss was observed in temperature range, i.e., between 200 °C and 400 °C, and DTA curve shows the exothermic reaction showing a peak at around 400 °C. This weight loss maybe due to decomposition of CF pigments in the residue. Composition of the CF materials really depends on the producing company but most of them are based on anthraquinone (red) and phtalocyanine (green or blue) [11]. These materials show the weight loss and exothermic reaction at temperatures lower than 600 °C [12,13,14]. These results indicate that thermal decomposition of the CF pigments could occur at lower than 600 °C. The inset in Figure 5a shows the yellow ITO powder obtained after heat treatment at 600 °C for 1 h in air. The color was similar to that of commercial ITO powder. The morphology of recovered ITO was observed by using HRTEM. The sizes of recovered ITO particles were less than 100 nm in diameter and appeared as aggregate as shown in Figure 5b.

Thermal behavior (a) and high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM) image (b) of the recovered ITO powder from TFT-LCD panel after heat treatment at 600 °C.

Figure 6 shows the X-ray diffraction pattern of the recovered ITO powder after heat-treatment at 600 °C. This pattern indicates that our sample has quite similar structure compared to a typical ITO crystal structure. The most intensive diffraction peak appeared at 30.5° and other peaks were at 35.5°, 50.9° and 60.7°. This pattern matches well with the diffraction pattern for the (222), (400), (440) and (622) orientations of cubic crystalline ITO [15,16]. Thus, the ITO particles after heat-treatment at 600 °C are well crystallized as cubic structure. However, the splitting of diffraction peak appeared at 30° indicates that the recovered ITO consists of two different layers. According to the reported results [17,18,19], splitting of XRD peak in ITO films was attributed to existence of two differently strained layers, i.e., amorphous and crystalline layer. The diffraction pattern of the recovered material was similar to that of pure ITO. It is supposed that most In atoms are uniformly substituted to Sn atoms in the lattice [20].

We have successfully recovered ITO in the form of nanoparticle from TFT-LCD panel scraps by using a simple lift-off method. This lift-off approach provided us a useful recovery method with high yield of 90%. ITO was easily separated as nanoparticles from glass substrate of TFT-LCD scarp. The size of the ITO nanoparticle was less than 100 nm, and appeared as aggregates. The recovered ITO was well crystallized to a (222) preferred orientation, and the composition ratio of In to Sn of about 91 to 9. The lift-off method described in this paper could be easily applied to the large scale recovery business dealing large size LCD panels from TV and other displays.

1. Global and china ITO sputtering targets industry research report 2013–2016. [(accessed on 26 November 2014)]. Available online: http://www.researchmoz.us/global-and-china-ito-sputtering-targets-industry-report-2013-2016-report.html

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5. Hong S.-J., Kim M.-S., Kim J.-W., Shin M. Characteristics of indium-tin-oxide (ITO) glass re-used from old TFT-LCD panel. Mater. Trans.2012;53:968–972. doi: 10.2320/matertrans.MBW201122. [CrossRef]

9. Pammi S., Chanda A., Seong N.-J., Yoon S.-G. Growth of high-quality ITO thin films at low temperature by tuning the oxygen flow rate using the nano-cluster deposition (NCD) technique. Chem. Phys. Lett.2010;490:234–237. doi: 10.1016/j.cplett.2010.03.035. [CrossRef]

10. Choi D., Kim Y.S., Son Y. Recovery of indium tin oxide (ITO) and glass plate from discarded TFT-LCD panels using an electrochemical method and acid treatment. RSC Adv.2014;4:50975–50980. doi: 10.1039/C4RA11085D. [CrossRef]

11. Kopacek B. ReLCD recycling and re-use of LCD panels; Proceedings of the 19th Waste Management Conference of the IWMSA (WasteCon2008); Durban, South Africa. 6–10 October 2008; pp. 6–10.

20. Nadaud N., Lequeux N., Nanot M., Jove J., Roisnel T. Structural studies of tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) and In4Sn3O12. J. Solid State Chem.1998;135:140–148. doi: 10.1006/jssc.1997.7613. [CrossRef]

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