revolution of the tft lcd technology free sample

The introduction of flat panel displays that are fabricated with thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT LCDs) has changed human"s lifestyle very significantly. Traditionally, the revolution of the TFT LCD technology has been presented by the timeline of product introduction. Namely, it first started with audio/video (AV) and notebook applications in the early 1990s, and then began to replace cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) for monitor and TV applications. Certainly, TFT LCDs will continue…Expand

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Recently, there is a lot of buzz about whether Apple will choose Mini-LEDover OLED, for the next round of iPads, MacBooks and other products. Regardless of the fascination analyzing current product releases, or one specific consumer-product company, the more significant movement over the last 5~10 years, has been the steep upwards ramp in Micro-LED Startups, IP, investments and acquisitions by: Apple, Facebook, and Google. And from the chip makers themselves such as Intel, Global-Foundries, in Startups such as Luxview, InfiniLED, Plessey, Aledia, Compound Photonics and more.

For an industry that is literally in the business of visualization, the display industry often seems rather opaque, mysterious, and even geo-politically contentious (refer: Foxconn"s LCD Fab in Wisconsin). These articles will cover aspects not well-elaborated in popular analysis, and also provide an update to the material presented 5yrs ago at the Bay-Area SID (Society for Information Displays), on why this technology, is so different, so disruptive, and how it will reach far beyond even the wildest market projections. But for a background on the basics of how & why, vision, the brain and displays work, recommend an easy to digest, and popular, book by Mark Changizi: The Vision Revolution. There are also excellent industry analysts, who cover displays professionally, and in much finer-grain detail, such as Yole Development (thanks to Eric Virey for source graphics) and DSCC (thanks to Ross Young & team for references, and feedback).

Firstly, to be clear: the flat-panel display industry is a semiconductor industry. This is the critical "border", where electrons of digital information, are turned into photons of visual information. And the pixels you see, while reading this article, are driven by transistors - Thin-Film Transistors (TFT) - somewhere between 3 and 12 transistors per pixel, depending on the type of display (OLED needs more than LCD), and the maker. The Transistor, Resistor, Capacitor circuits are built by nano-scale material deposition processes, on a glass substrate (the backplane), via semiconductor manufacturing equipment, from suppliers including US"s Applied Materials, Japan"s Canon Tokki, Korea"s SNU Precision, Wonik IPS and more. Yet it has not attracted the same strategic interest from within the US, as other semiconductor industry segments e.g. processor chips. While there is a drive to increase the number of (existing) semiconductor chip fabs on US soil, the fact is that the US has no significant domestic display manufacturing capability at all, effectivelyzero. And the same is true for most of the technology ingredients comprising the display, such as the film layers, LED’s & OLED and their ingredient materials, and the controller & driver chips - which is dominated entirely by non-US companies you probably never heard of, such as Taiwan Novatek (the 13th largest semi maker, worldwide), Taiwan Himax, Taiwan Parade, and Japan"s Renesas. That is, until one of them has a problem.

So if the geopolitical semiconductor war gets any rougher, you might be wondering, where is this chip (that Biden is holding) going to display it"s output ? On an etch-sketch ? (perhaps the only display device still made in the US ?)

Since more than 40% of our brain is devoted to vision, more than all of the other senses combined, this would seem an important gap. After all, light, color and contrast are the fundamentals of art, literature, civilization, as well as your next Zoom virtual meeting. Of course we need to see the results of the computation of AI, CPU, Memory, GPU, Network, 5G ... processors, appear on some display eventually, right ? So this article also aims to provide some more insights on key factors in the previous transition, what"s going on now, why it"s important, and how it may matter in real-life terms.

Secondly, (and this an easy bet) you’re more likely reading this article on an LCD flat-panel Display, rather than OLED or ePaper. But all 3 have been transformational technologies of the 21st century. Could modern society continue to communicate effectively, presenting a person in front of you from anywhere/anytime, productivity continuing virtually, during a Global Pandemic ? What would it have been like if we were still sharing the 20th century family’s TV ? (recap for millennials: the Cathode Ray Tube TV was a 50 ~ 100 lb, X-Ray-emitting, monster appliance, using electron beam scanning technology from the 1920"s, and with coarse interlaced video rendering designed to save 6MHz (3 Mbit/s by modern standards) of precious radio-frequency bandwidth). Even the 12yr old iPhone 3GS could muster more than that, on a bad day.

As for myself, am writing this article across two of my favorite consumer flat-panel devices: a newer 15” Retina MacBook Pro and an older 17” MacBook Pro. Partly because both are still the best, un-compromised, example of the portability & performance enabled by the Hybrid Graphics technology, a Display & GPU technology, drove across the laptop industry while working at NVIDIA. But mostly because Apple consistently aims for excellence in their displays. Am enjoying a large, bright, 300 “nit” (candela/meter2) LCD screen, an excellent 900~1000:1 contrast ratio, a full DCI-P3 color gamut, and sharp 220 ppi "retina" resolution that renders crisp text and beautiful images. The recurring theme: light, color, contrast.

However, at the 2019, 2020 and 2021 CES, Micro-LED and Mini-LED began appearing across more and more applications (e.g. TV, AR, Monitors, Digital Signage), and demo"s like the Samsung Wall and Sony MicroLED continue to attract the largest, most excited crowds, have ever seen at CES (before it went virtual). Back in 2017, I wrote this article about Micro-LED & Mini-LED"s, talking about potential applications, and specifically about the key challenges to this visual revolution, that PixelDisplay set out to solve: in the color conversion material needed to more economically create Red & Green from the high efficiency Blue. In November 2020, PixelDisplay publicly disclosed details of NanoBright™solution, at the Phosphor & QD Summit, and is now offered for sale on PixelDisplay.com

In the Mini-LED ecosystem, the role of NanoBright is often used the same as per regular white LED"s, which in 2018 PixelDisplay estimated to be worth $750m/yr, but this market is now projected to be worth $5b, for Mini-LED"s overall, by 2025. The color converter can be simply coated on the Mini-LED and surrounding backplane (providing a high efficiency, bright-contrast, High-Dynamic-Range with DCI-P3 wide-color gamut), but there are more interesting benefits e.g. eliminating existing LCD films to make thinner, borderless and more efficient.

But to put this in larger perspective, here"s the role NanoBright™fills in the Micro-LED ecosystem, as described in DSCC"s ( @Guillaume Chansin) excellent LinkedIn article.

But why should this Micro-LED technology be of any broader importance ? Why is it any different than OLED, or LCD ? How is it a disrupting technology ? What difference does it have from any of the other opaque display industry machinations that means it will have significant impact in our lives? It"s a great test to ask: "would my mother care ?".

To start with how it"s different, and how it is disruptive, we need to recap on how we got here on the glass backplane of LCD and OLED. And to fully appreciate the magnitude of the disruption represented by the Micro-LED revolution, we have to also understand the scale of the investment behind the commercializing flat-panel glass, and to the display TFT semiconductor industry.

Am not going to cover the long sordid history of display technologies, nor the detailed lineage of LCD, or OLED. But it is worth noting that both technologies were born in the US, the LCD from RCA, and the OLED from Kodak - and ironically, both pioneering companies are now just brands - non practicing entities. But there are other pioneers, such as UDC, who have persisted, and remain necessary ingredients in the ecosystem (we"ll touch on "why ?" later). But instead, will identify two key elements from the 1990"s, that were the major accelerators flat-panel displays to escape velocity in 2000"s, launched the FPD revolution into orbit, and led to the proliferation of what we enjoy today:

1) TFT follows Square-Rule Growth:To understand the explosion in the economics of producing glass flat panel displays covered in TFT pixels, we can start with the size increases of the glass processing fabrication itself. The term, "Gen" refers to the size generation, the capability of the TFT panel fab, by the dimensions of the glass sheet that it can process, which typically entails creating deposition layers stacked layer-by-layer, to build the TFT pixels - whether OLED or LCD, it starts with TFT pixels on a sheet of glass. In the late 90’s, massive government investments spurred the creation of ever larger display fabrication facilities, with ever larger deposition equipment based on the successful A-Si (amorphous Silicon) process, which grew quickly from Gen 3.5 (0.62 x 0.75m) to Gen 5 (1.1 x 1.3m) to Gen 6 (1.5 x 1.85m) glass substrates, in just a handful of years. Every sheet of glass processed in an LCD production line is cut into smaller panels, making TV’s, Monitors, laptops, tablets and phones.

But unlike Moore’s Law (which doubles transistors every 18months), the glass panel area increase (width x height) results in a faster, power-of-2 square-rule, increase in the number of pixels, and thus the number of TFT transistors. In fact, the number of semiconductor transistors on glass TFT was increasing at 2.5x Moore’s Law, during the last decade. While it took 10 years to go from 5mil transistors in Intel’s Pentium Pro 1995, to 169 mil transistors in the Prescott CPU 2005 – the LCD display industry made the same increase in the number of TFT transistors for 8K resolution, in roughly 5 years (from the PixelDisplay presentation at the 2018 DSCC Future Display Technology Conference).

By early 2000"s, Plasma was beyond hope, the transition from CRT"s was in full-swing, the IBM Thinkpad was a staple of corporate life, and laptops had crossed the 8hr battery-life mark thanks to display efficiency improvements (as we"ll discuss later the display is the key enabler of longer battery-life). The LCD plants were pumping out everything from laptop screens, to LCD monitors, to 60" large-screen LCD TV"s, at lower-and-lower price-points - from fabs based in Japan, then Taiwan, and Korea. By the late 2000"s, the Fab-depreciation (eff. cost of borrowed capital) was the most significant component of the LCD panel prices, and panel makers squeezed the margins out of everyone in the supply chain including films, LED, controller and driver chips. Major winners were the materials suppliers: Corning Inc (the Glass), Merck (the LCD material itself), Nichia (the backlight LED"s), and Canon Tokki & Applied Materials (TFT-glass deposition equipment).

Meanwhile in the US, Intel made a huge bet in 2001, that LCD would not scale, and that LCOS would provide solutions, and enable larger-screen, like the earlier (CRT-based TV) projection displays. But in just 3~4 years, it became clear the LCD square-rule economies were different, ever-larger ever-cheaper LCD panels seemed to be viral, ramping to fill the large-screen TV market. The LCOS & DLP were relegated to the projector market, and Intel exited LCOS in late 2004. It"s worth noting Intel has gradually become more active in the display industry, and Intel Capital has made multiple investments in the Micro-LED partnerships for GaN-on-Si (and we"ll come back to that later).

Outside the US, the display industry has been the target of massive strategic investments for Asia for over 3 decades. Starting with Japan government forcing the collaboration of Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba to create JDI (which made the first iPhone and iPad screens), and the INCJ (a government investment consortium) of Japan, then Korea and Taiwan Governments, and then China. Today this industry is dominated by China, as per the reports from analysts e.g. this one from Display Supply Chain Consultants. The government of China and private investors, aggressively funded the rise of China from sub 10% a decade ago, to owning more than 63% of the world’s display production. By 2017, the Taiwan government had publicly stated they were no longer going to invest in more LCD fabs, and in 2018 the chairman of LG got up in front of the entire company taking a sledge hammer to smash an LCD TV, in a symbolic communication of the company"s shift in focus to the highly profitable OLED (not facing competition from China) - the fate of LCD flat-panels was sealed.

One example of China"s investment in display leadership is Beijing Opto Electronics (BOE). And I have visited BOE’s Gen 6, 8.5, and 10.5 (2.9m x 3.4m) fabs in HeFei and Beijing. This picture below is a panorama I took standing outside one of the older (smaller, older) Gen 8.5 Fab"s from a visit to the BOE facility in HeFei. At the time, they had built a Gen 10 behind it, and building another beside that.

But when you’re outside looking at a factory that is literally over 1.3 kilometer per side, the staggering magnitude of China"s investment in display leadership, is simply breathtaking. The first Gen 10.5 fab located in Sakai Japan, was also Japan"s last one. But at last count there are seven (7) Gen 10.5 fabs in Mainland China, and still more are being built. There is no questioning China’s intent to seize control over the majority of eye-balls, from the source.

2) Inorganic Solid-State gives 4x increase in efficiency: The second important innovation was the In/GaN-based Blue LED. Invented in Japan (ironically, US-based CREE had a blue LED earlier, but failed to productize until much later), from which Nichia made White LED’s, by adding yellow-emitting YAG:Ce inorganic phosphor, they had left over from their CRT phosphor business. It was a cheap trick to synthesize something that looked White, from a psycho-visual hack of using two complementary colors: Blue + Yellow. But in short, the poor color was an acceptable tradeoff for higher-efficiency, smaller size, more robust inorganic solid-state solution. LED backlights quickly transformed the industry from (thicker, bulky, and very fragile) fluorescent tube (CCFL) backlights, into thin/efficient LED backlights, in the early-mid 2000"s. And the lead inventors, including Shuji Nakamora of Nichia, won the 2014 Nobel prize for the work on GaN LED.

This was an important step forward in the story. Originally, the CCFL backlit display was 70~80% of the total power consumption of an idle Laptop. In fact, back in 2001 while at Intel, together with Ying Cui we invented and implemented Intel’s Backlight Modulation Technology (called DPST(tm)) which was like an inverse-High-Dynamic Range, it proportionally increased pixel contrast, in order to allow decreasing the CCFL backlight brightness and provide huge system power-savings. That was the star feature of Intel’s EBL (Extended Battery Life) initiative, saving more system power than other, more publicized, Intel CPU features (e.g. Geyserville aka "SpeedStep"). For me, that was a first introduction to the value and importance of the flat-panel display technology, as the essential ingredient in portable platforms. But LED"s further helped enable the "implosion" of visual-compute portability into sub-8lb / sub-1inch Laptops. And the displays that appeared in Phones and Tablets, were using LED"s that are only 0.4~0.6 mm tall, fitting in the edge of the panel.

Today, LED efficiency is over 200 lm/W (4x the efficiency of older CCFL), but efficiency improvements in processor and memory technology means the display is still typically 50~70% of total system power for phone or laptop, and this is worse for OLED (than LCD) because of how poorly OLED technology handles mostly-white backgrounds (e.g. of browsers, text & productivity applications).

The LED industry has also been a source of massive investment and deeply geopolitical rifts as Japan (e.g. Nichia) vs Korea (e.g. Seoul Semi Conductor) vs Taiwan (e.g. Foxconn/AOT, LiteOn, Epistar) vs China (e.g. CSOT, SanAn). Initially dominated by IP held by Nichia, CREE and Osram, those players now have diminished roles, but it has remained a complex ecosystem.

Tiny efficient LED"s enable 2D-array backlighting on LCD to achieve HDR (High-Dynamic-Range). Higher-end LCD TV"s were the first consumer displays to use LED"s with better R-G Phosphors to create a wider DCI-P3 color gamut. Firstly, arranging the Edge-Backlight LED"s to control 1-Dimensional regions, from along the edge. And then advancing into 2D-array of LED"s, to create active-region backlight. This enabled LCD"s to increase the contrast ratio beyond 1000:1, and peak brightness beyond traditional edge illumination, creating the High-Dynamic Range (HDR) experience first popularized by BrightSide (later acquired by Dolby, to form DolbyVision, and which is now licensed-technology on the iPhone). Today HDR content leverages individual screen-region lighting, to create brighter highlights, and the deeper-blacks to create a more realistic and dynamic experience. In summary, HDR LCD TV with 2D backlight became commercially practical as a result of small (less than 3.0 x 3.0 mm) LED"s with over 220 Lm/W efficiency - 13x more efficient than incandescent bulbs Brightside originally used, which had required huge exotic water cooling solution.

Challenges of the "Crystal Cycle":the size of these glass-processing fab investments is so large, and the equipment CapEx expenditures are so huge, that this leads to massive disconnect between supply and demand, causing large cyclical swings in pricing, which became known as the "Crystal Cycle"

To ride the economies of scale requires increasing the glass handling size, which requires ever larger investments, just as the second of Moore’s Laws predicts. For example, BOE’s invested US$7 billion to make a Gen 10.5 fab. And in an interesting geopolitical twist, after the Taiwan (once a former colony of Japan) government declared they were not investing anymore in the LCD business, Terry Guo (Taiwan Foxconn CEO), acquired a majority of Sharp, and their huge LCD display production lines in Kameyama (which made the innovative IGZO-based LCD panels, which enabled the thinner/more-efficient iPhone 6, and iPad Air), and Japan’s only Gen 10.5 plant in Sakai, which is making 8K TV’s (was spun-off into Sakai Display Corporation). Foxconn was already a large player in the display industry owning Taiwan’s #2 maker, Innolux Optoelectronics. Far beyond merely being “the sport of king’s”, the display industry has been “the sport of nations”.

OLED is doubly challenged: and it has not become progressively cheaper with economies-of-scale as many expected. In LCD only a tiny current is needed to flip a pixel, all of the light is produced from a thin string of backlight LED"s. Whereas in OLED, every pixel is itself a light emitting organic-LED, with many orders of magnitude higher current required at every pixel. The high contrast emissive pixel design of OLED displays provides excellent contrast, but typically requires the use of the more expensive and complex LTPS (low-temperature polycrystalline silicon) process to produce the active TFT driving backplane. LTPS involves a more complex 11-step process, with much higher-temperatures that only a few materials (glass, clear polyamide) can sustain. LTPS requires a high-power excimer laser to anneal the surface, forming the layer of polycrystalline silicon - this is slow, and does not scale well into larger sizes. The OLED fabs have thus been limited to Gen 6 (1.5 x 1.85m) or smaller, in glass size. Even though this is big enough to make a few TV"s, the smaller starting glass size means the cost-curve is sub-optimal, unless partitioned into many smaller panels e.g. the higher-cost has lower impact for smaller smartphone screen. While an oxide deposition process called LTPO (a simpler Oxide process, borrowing from the IGZO process that delivered LCD efficiency improvements in iPhone 6 & iPad Air), offers some hope in the future, there’s another additional challenge.

The complexities of driving a large number of emitters from a thin layer on glass backplane has also meant limits on full-screen brightness, and limited ability to address higher resolutions. A full screen of white does not occur often on a OLED TV, as it does on an Tablet or Laptop, but if you do witness a larger amount of white (as in productivity apps on a Laptop) you"d notice the whole OLED screen goes dimmer, this is done in order to limit the total current across the thin conductor traces that feed the pixels on the glass.

Unlike LCD TFT (which only requires a single transistor and storage capacitor), a typical OLED driving circuit can have 3~6 transistor (and similar number of capacitors) per color i.e. 9~18 transistors per pixel. This driving complexity also limits the net active emitting area of the pixel, versus the inactive driving circuit, also called the "Fill-Ratio". And that"s part of the reason why the Oculus and Samsung Gear VR headsets look like watching everything through a thick fly-screen mesh - the amount of non-emitting "dark-area" per pixel is huge (much larger than LCD). Laying out complex circuits naturally extends the non-emitting pixel-area, horizontally outwards in width & length, that is of course a limitation of thin deposition layers on glass. This limits both the ability to go into finer pitch (>1000ppi and 40Kx16K resolution is the ultimate goal for x-Reality displays), and also to create larger emitters for higher brightness.

Furthermore, the front-plane of an OLED panel requires ultra-precise patterning with emissive organic phosphor materials, with tightly controlled size & depth-tolerances. This has switched from vapor deposition, to inkjet patterning to save some cost, but because of the non-uniformity it is limited in ability to go into very fine pitch, retina-quality displays. But either way, the OLED materials themselves remain very expensive, with Universal Display Corp (UDC) maintaining a tight grip on the materials supply chain, thanks to a portfolio of significant & early IP. The alternatives to UDC patents, such as HF (Hyper fluorescence e.g. KyuLux) or TADFL (thermally activated delayed fluorescence e.g. Cynora) are really 5~10yrs out, and merging QD on OLED aka "QD-OLED (e.g. Nanosys & Samsung) has consistently missed every promised demo/roll-out, and feels more like either a science project, or a ploy for negotiating UDC pricing.

But since OLED breaks-down with age, and even faster with moisture, heat, and higher-energy blue/uv photons (reminder, the “O” in OLED, stands for Organic), the use of glass (or expensive polyamide materials) with low gas & moisture permeability remains a requirement, since lifetime & brightness remain the bigger issues for OLED. In the phone industry, key manufacturers came to embrace OLED since it looks fantastic but wears out - after-all consumers are more motivated to buy a new phone, if it looks noticeably brighter and sharper, than the worn-out 2-year-old one in hand. While higher production costs, aging and burn-in problems of OLED have been acceptable (even desirable) in the phone business, they have hampered the progression of OLED into IT and Automotive applications. And while OLED came with the promise of more freedoms than LCD, in creating foldable and flexible displays, the fact remains: it lasts longer when hermetically encapsulated in glass the best barrier protecting from oxygen and moisture.

While OLED has not enjoyed the same cost-reduction curve, as in the LCD proliferation, the higher-end and visually-satisfying (initial) experience continue to feed hope & investment. Glass TFT has both enabled, and limited OLED"s ability to achieve higher brightness, and higher resolution. There"s frequently news of better OLED solution coming down the research pipeline, and we"ve already touched on the bigger ones (e.g. Hyperfluorescence, Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence, Quantum Dot on OLED), but the reality has fallen far short, nor is there anything helping to break-free from the most expensive TFT processes. OLED is very likely to continue to service the small display markets, products that have a shorter life expectancy, and only need a lower-brightness display (e.g. TV"s, which only need 100nits of brightness).

The industry is ripe for disruption from a brighter, more robust inorganic solution, that comes with a better (near-term) ability to reduce cost as it scales.

Unmet needs, in important niche markets: is the essential formula, for the beginning of disruption, as outlined by Clayton Christensen. Who described the formula for disruption as essentially: a niche market (of future importance) with unmet needs, that can afford to adopt a more expensive solution, where that solution has an ability to scale and leverage the niche-win to expand into broader markets, displacing incumbent technologies. Some example display niche markets:Automotive and Smartwatches displays have been over 1,000 nits for some time, but need much more to compete with typical daylight glare.

Autonomous vehicles (e.g. robo-taxis) are on the horizon, but pause for a moment to consider how they will visually communicate to passengers & pedestrians, when no human is present ? No driver to confirm name or usher in passenger, or gesticulate with body language to other less-patient human drivers. The solutions are being developed right now (and PixelDisplay is involved), they of course need to operate in bright daylight, and be colorful & robust as the painted bumper panel or shatter-resistant safety-glass, they"ll be integrated-into.

When the HDR standards were formed, they included a high peak-brightness of 10,000 nits (far beyond wildest dreams of OLED and Quantum Dots), and real-world contrast ratio"s (>10x that available on LCD with edge backlight). And studio-grade content-authoring displays can do well over 4,000 nits, but need constant recalibration to account for non-uniformity from wear, and sometimes replaced after only a year. We can expect this to migrate into more consumer displays over the next 5yrs, and the Gaming/TV/Video/Movie content standards (BluRay-UHD, VESA DisplayHDR and the Hollywood UHD-Alliance) already integrated that support.

These are markets that will pay for a more expensive solution, that can deliver unmet needs of bright, high (HDR) contrast, deep-black and defined shadows, and crisp-rich colors (like OLED), in a thin form-factor, but with higher brightness and longer lifetime (like LED-backlit LCD).

The value of the Flat Panel Display: the industry is worth over $120 billion (3x the value of the GPU market), and is project to grow to well over $200 billion by 2025. Yearly production (rough numbers): over 1.8 billion smartphone panels, 300 million laptop and tablet panels. This thin, complex, glass-stack, in the flat-panel module, still represents the single most expensive component in the phone & tablet (and many laptops also).

In the iPhone BOM, the display has, at times, been more than 2~3x the cost of the SoC (CPU & GPU) and RF BaseBand chips, combined. And in the iPhone 12, the new OLED display is responsible for 35% of the BOM cost increase vs iPhone 11. It should then, be unsurprising that Apple (unlike Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, DELL or any other OEM that I know), has multiple (large) divisions devoted just to display technology - one in each of their business verticals. Staffed with display architects, and engineers refining technologies, sourcing core materials (even the phosphors), creating new designs. Even custom-designing the display controller and driver chips, for the panel makers to insert inside displays made - exclusively for Apple - that are not available to any other panel customers. Perhaps because it is the most critical border of the Visual Information Age, and obviously because it is necessary to control the border to control your future, right ?

In summary,during this pandemic we"re able to adapt and continue our communications visually; collaborating, pitching, working efficiently, and remotely from anywhere; thanks to the internet, wireless connectivity, and the glass flat-panel visual interface. Long Zoom sessions can be taxing, but imagine if this had happened in the 1950"s, 1970"s or 1990"s ? Would our children have been able to engage in school remotely ? Would we have remained as connected, and as productive ?

The technology innovations may have US origins, but the major enablers of the last visual revolution were: a) execution driven by massive investments in manufacturing & commercialization from: Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China in flat-panel display leadership, b) faster than Moore’s Law growth in the economies-of-scale of glass-substrate TFT pixels, and c) the shift to cheaper/smaller/robustsolid-state In/GaN semiconductor LED technology.

Now there’s a another shift happening. With the Micro-LED & Mini-LED generation, there"s a new, and very different, formula. Unlike the past display technologies: Micro-LED are innately decoupled from the glass backplane, and that changes everything.

In the next article,more details of how this visual revolution is progressing, firstly re-igniting LCD 2.0 with Mini-LED"s, and breaking through the glass-barrier with Micro-LED"s, and what displays of the future will look like.

A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) is a variant of a liquid-crystal display that uses thin-film-transistor technologyactive matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven (i.e. with segments directly connected to electronics outside the LCD) LCDs with a few segments.

In February 1957, John Wallmark of RCA filed a patent for a thin film MOSFET. Paul K. Weimer, also of RCA implemented Wallmark"s ideas and developed the thin-film transistor (TFT) in 1962, a type of MOSFET distinct from the standard bulk MOSFET. It was made with thin films of cadmium selenide and cadmium sulfide. The idea of a TFT-based liquid-crystal display (LCD) was conceived by Bernard Lechner of RCA Laboratories in 1968. In 1971, Lechner, F. J. Marlowe, E. O. Nester and J. Tults demonstrated a 2-by-18 matrix display driven by a hybrid circuit using the dynamic scattering mode of LCDs.T. Peter Brody, J. A. Asars and G. D. Dixon at Westinghouse Research Laboratories developed a CdSe (cadmium selenide) TFT, which they used to demonstrate the first CdSe thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD).active-matrix liquid-crystal display (AM LCD) using CdSe TFTs in 1974, and then Brody coined the term "active matrix" in 1975.high-resolution and high-quality electronic visual display devices use TFT-based active matrix displays.

The liquid crystal displays used in calculators and other devices with similarly simple displays have direct-driven image elements, and therefore a voltage can be easily applied across just one segment of these types of displays without interfering with the other segments. This would be impractical for a large display, because it would have a large number of (color) picture elements (pixels), and thus it would require millions of connections, both top and bottom for each one of the three colors (red, green and blue) of every pixel. To avoid this issue, the pixels are addressed in rows and columns, reducing the connection count from millions down to thousands. The column and row wires attach to transistor switches, one for each pixel. The one-way current passing characteristic of the transistor prevents the charge that is being applied to each pixel from being drained between refreshes to a display"s image. Each pixel is a small capacitor with a layer of insulating liquid crystal sandwiched between transparent conductive ITO layers.

The circuit layout process of a TFT-LCD is very similar to that of semiconductor products. However, rather than fabricating the transistors from silicon, that is formed into a crystalline silicon wafer, they are made from a thin film of amorphous silicon that is deposited on a glass panel. The silicon layer for TFT-LCDs is typically deposited using the PECVD process.

Polycrystalline silicon is sometimes used in displays requiring higher TFT performance. Examples include small high-resolution displays such as those found in projectors or viewfinders. Amorphous silicon-based TFTs are by far the most common, due to their lower production cost, whereas polycrystalline silicon TFTs are more costly and much more difficult to produce.

The twisted nematic display is one of the oldest and frequently cheapest kind of LCD display technologies available. TN displays benefit from fast pixel response times and less smearing than other LCD display technology, but suffer from poor color reproduction and limited viewing angles, especially in the vertical direction. Colors will shift, potentially to the point of completely inverting, when viewed at an angle that is not perpendicular to the display. Modern, high end consumer products have developed methods to overcome the technology"s shortcomings, such as RTC (Response Time Compensation / Overdrive) technologies. Modern TN displays can look significantly better than older TN displays from decades earlier, but overall TN has inferior viewing angles and poor color in comparison to other technology.

Most TN panels can represent colors using only six bits per RGB channel, or 18 bit in total, and are unable to display the 16.7 million color shades (24-bit truecolor) that are available using 24-bit color. Instead, these panels display interpolated 24-bit color using a dithering method that combines adjacent pixels to simulate the desired shade. They can also use a form of temporal dithering called Frame Rate Control (FRC), which cycles between different shades with each new frame to simulate an intermediate shade. Such 18 bit panels with dithering are sometimes advertised as having "16.2 million colors". These color simulation methods are noticeable to many people and highly bothersome to some.gamut (often referred to as a percentage of the NTSC 1953 color gamut) are also due to backlighting technology. It is not uncommon for older displays to range from 10% to 26% of the NTSC color gamut, whereas other kind of displays, utilizing more complicated CCFL or LED phosphor formulations or RGB LED backlights, may extend past 100% of the NTSC color gamut, a difference quite perceivable by the human eye.

The transmittance of a pixel of an LCD panel typically does not change linearly with the applied voltage,sRGB standard for computer monitors requires a specific nonlinear dependence of the amount of emitted light as a function of the RGB value.

In-plane switching was developed by Hitachi Ltd. in 1996 to improve on the poor viewing angle and the poor color reproduction of TN panels at that time.

Initial iterations of IPS technology were characterised by slow response time and a low contrast ratio but later revisions have made marked improvements to these shortcomings. Because of its wide viewing angle and accurate color reproduction (with almost no off-angle color shift), IPS is widely employed in high-end monitors aimed at professional graphic artists, although with the recent fall in price it has been seen in the mainstream market as well. IPS technology was sold to Panasonic by Hitachi.

Most panels also support true 8-bit per channel color. These improvements came at the cost of a higher response time, initially about 50 ms. IPS panels were also extremely expensive.

IPS has since been superseded by S-IPS (Super-IPS, Hitachi Ltd. in 1998), which has all the benefits of IPS technology with the addition of improved pixel refresh timing.

In 2004, Hydis Technologies Co., Ltd licensed its AFFS patent to Japan"s Hitachi Displays. Hitachi is using AFFS to manufacture high end panels in their product line. In 2006, Hydis also licensed its AFFS to Sanyo Epson Imaging Devices Corporation.

It achieved pixel response which was fast for its time, wide viewing angles, and high contrast at the cost of brightness and color reproduction.Response Time Compensation) technologies.

Less expensive PVA panels often use dithering and FRC, whereas super-PVA (S-PVA) panels all use at least 8 bits per color component and do not use color simulation methods.BRAVIA LCD TVs offer 10-bit and xvYCC color support, for example, the Bravia X4500 series. S-PVA also offers fast response times using modern RTC technologies.

When the field is on, the liquid crystal molecules start to tilt towards the center of the sub-pixels because of the electric field; as a result, a continuous pinwheel alignment (CPA) is formed; the azimuthal angle rotates 360 degrees continuously resulting in an excellent viewing angle. The ASV mode is also called CPA mode.

A technology developed by Samsung is Super PLS, which bears similarities to IPS panels, has wider viewing angles, better image quality, increased brightness, and lower production costs. PLS technology debuted in the PC display market with the release of the Samsung S27A850 and S24A850 monitors in September 2011.

TFT dual-transistor pixel or cell technology is a reflective-display technology for use in very-low-power-consumption applications such as electronic shelf labels (ESL), digital watches, or metering. DTP involves adding a secondary transistor gate in the single TFT cell to maintain the display of a pixel during a period of 1s without loss of image or without degrading the TFT transistors over time. By slowing the refresh rate of the standard frequency from 60 Hz to 1 Hz, DTP claims to increase the power efficiency by multiple orders of magnitude.

Due to the very high cost of building TFT factories, there are few major OEM panel vendors for large display panels. The glass panel suppliers are as follows:

External consumer display devices like a TFT LCD feature one or more analog VGA, DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort interface, with many featuring a selection of these interfaces. Inside external display devices there is a controller board that will convert the video signal using color mapping and image scaling usually employing the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in order to convert any video source like CVBS, VGA, DVI, HDMI, etc. into digital RGB at the native resolution of the display panel. In a laptop the graphics chip will directly produce a signal suitable for connection to the built-in TFT display. A control mechanism for the backlight is usually included on the same controller board.

The low level interface of STN, DSTN, or TFT display panels use either single ended TTL 5 V signal for older displays or TTL 3.3 V for slightly newer displays that transmits the pixel clock, horizontal sync, vertical sync, digital red, digital green, digital blue in parallel. Some models (for example the AT070TN92) also feature input/display enable, horizontal scan direction and vertical scan direction signals.

New and large (>15") TFT displays often use LVDS signaling that transmits the same contents as the parallel interface (Hsync, Vsync, RGB) but will put control and RGB bits into a number of serial transmission lines synchronized to a clock whose rate is equal to the pixel rate. LVDS transmits seven bits per clock per data line, with six bits being data and one bit used to signal if the other six bits need to be inverted in order to maintain DC balance. Low-cost TFT displays often have three data lines and therefore only directly support 18 bits per pixel. Upscale displays have four or five data lines to support 24 bits per pixel (truecolor) or 30 bits per pixel respectively. Panel manufacturers are slowly replacing LVDS with Internal DisplayPort and Embedded DisplayPort, which allow sixfold reduction of the number of differential pairs.

Backlight intensity is usually controlled by varying a few volts DC, or generating a PWM signal, or adjusting a potentiometer or simply fixed. This in turn controls a high-voltage (1.3 kV) DC-AC inverter or a matrix of LEDs. The method to control the intensity of LED is to pulse them with PWM which can be source of harmonic flicker.

The bare display panel will only accept a digital video signal at the resolution determined by the panel pixel matrix designed at manufacture. Some screen panels will ignore the LSB bits of the color information to present a consistent interface (8 bit -> 6 bit/color x3).

With analogue signals like VGA, the display controller also needs to perform a high speed analog to digital conversion. With digital input signals like DVI or HDMI some simple reordering of the bits is needed before feeding it to the rescaler if the input resolution doesn"t match the display panel resolution.

The statements are applicable to Merck KGaA as well as its competitors JNC Corporation (formerly Chisso Corporation) and DIC (formerly Dainippon Ink & Chemicals). All three manufacturers have agreed not to introduce any acutely toxic or mutagenic liquid crystals to the market. They cover more than 90 percent of the global liquid crystal market. The remaining market share of liquid crystals, produced primarily in China, consists of older, patent-free substances from the three leading world producers and have already been tested for toxicity by them. As a result, they can also be considered non-toxic.

Kawamoto, H. (2012). "The Inventors of TFT Active-Matrix LCD Receive the 2011 IEEE Nishizawa Medal". Journal of Display Technology. 8 (1): 3–4. Bibcode:2012JDisT...8....3K. doi:10.1109/JDT.2011.2177740. ISSN 1551-319X.

Richard Ahrons (2012). "Industrial Research in Microcircuitry at RCA: The Early Years, 1953–1963". 12 (1). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing: 60–73. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

K. H. Lee; H. Y. Kim; K. H. Park; S. J. Jang; I. C. Park & J. Y. Lee (June 2006). "A Novel Outdoor Readability of Portable TFT-LCD with AFFS Technology". SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers. AIP. 37 (1): 1079–82. doi:10.1889/1.2433159. S2CID 129569963.

Kim, Sae-Bom; Kim, Woong-Ki; Chounlamany, Vanseng; Seo, Jaehwan; Yoo, Jisu; Jo, Hun-Je; Jung, Jinho (15 August 2012). "Identification of multi-level toxicity of liquid crystal display wastewater toward Daphnia magna and Moina macrocopa". Journal of Hazardous Materials. Seoul, Korea; Laos, Lao. 227–228: 327–333. doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2012.05.059. PMID 22677053.

TFT liquid crystal screen means that each liquid crystal pixel on the liquid crystal display is driven by a thin film transistor integrated behind it, so that it can display information at high speed, high brightness and high contrast.

TFT technology was developed in the 1990s. It is a large-scale semiconductor full integrated circuit manufacturing technology using new materials and new processes. It is a liquid crystal (LC), inorganic and organic thin film electroluminescent (EL and OEL) flat panel display. The basics.

1. Large area: The first generation of large-area glass substrate (300mm×400mm) TFT-LCD production line was put into production in the early 1990s. By the first half of 2000, the area of the glass substrate had expanded to 680mm×880mm. Recently, the glass substrate of 950mm×1200mm will also be put into operation;

2. Powerful functions: TFT was first used as a matrix addressing circuit to improve the light valve characteristics of liquid crystals. For high-resolution displays, precise control of object elements is achieved through voltage regulation in the range of 0-6V (typical value 0.2 to 4V), making it possible for LCDs to achieve high-quality high-resolution displays;

3. Low cost: glass substrates and plastic substrates fundamentally solve the cost problem of large-scale semiconductor integrated circuits, and open up a broad application space for the application of large-scale semiconductor integrated circuits;

4. Flexible process: In addition to sputtering, CVD (chemical vapor deposition) MCVD (molecular chemical vapor deposition) and other traditional film forming processes, laser annealing technology has also begun to be applied, which can produce amorphous films, polycrystalline films, and Fabrication of single crystal films. Not only silicon films can be produced, but also other II-VI and III-V semiconductor thin films can be produced;

5. It has a wide range of applications. LCD flat panel display based on medical TFT LCD screen equipment technology is the pillar industry of the information society. Its technology can be applied to the rapidly growing thin film transistor and organic electroluminescent (TFT-OLED) flat panel Displays are also growing rapidly.

With the maturity of TFT technology in the early 1990s, color liquid crystal flat-panel displays developed rapidly. In less than 10 years, TFT-LCD has rapidly grown into a mainstream display screen, which is inseparable from its advantages.

1. Good use characteristics: low-voltage application, low driving voltage, and improved safety and reliability in solidification. Flat and thin, it saves a lot of raw materials and space. Low power consumption, its power consumption is about one tenth of that of a CRT display, and the reflective TFT-LCD is even only about one percent of that of a CRT, saving a lot of energy. TFT-LCD products also have many characteristics such as standard models, serialized sizes, various varieties, convenient and flexible use, easy maintenance, update, and upgrade, and long service life;

2. Good environmental protection characteristics: no radiation, no flicker, no damage to the health of users. In particular, the emergence of TFT-LCD electronic books will bring mankind into the era of paperless office and paperless printing, triggering a revolution in the way of human learning, dissemination and recording civilization.

1971 – Lechner, F. J. Marlowe, E. O. Nester, and J. Tults demonstrated a 2-by-18 matrix display driven by a hybrid circuit using the dynamic scattering mode of LCDs

2020 – TFT LCD display technology dominants the display market now. Within the last 20 years, it has wiped out the market of CRT (cathode-ray tube) and Plasma. The only challenges are OLED (organic light-emitting diode)and Micro LED (Maybe, still in lab).

TFT LCD Display (Thin-Film-Transistor Liquid Crystal Display) technology has a sandwich-like structure with liquid crystal material filled between two glass plates. Two polarizer filters, color filters (RGB, red/green/blue) and two alignment layers determine exactly the amount of light is allowed to pass and which colors are created.

Each pixel in an active matrix is paired with a transistor that includes a capacitor which gives each sub-pixel the ability to retain its charge, instead of requiring an electrical charge sent each time it needed to be changed.  The TFT layer controls light flow a color filter displays the color and a top layer houses your visible screen.

Utilizing an electrical charge that causes the liquid crystal material to change their molecular structure allowing various wavelengths of backlight to “pass-through”. The active matrix of the TFT display is in constant flux and changes or refreshes rapidly depending upon the incoming signal from the control device.

The pixels of TFT displays are determined by the underlying density (resolution) of the color matrix and TFT layout. The more pixels the higher detail is available.Available screen size, power consumption, resolution, interface (how to connect) define the TFT displays.

The pixels of TFT displays are determined by the underlying density (resolution) of the color matrix and TFT layout. The more pixels the higher detail is available. Available screen size, power consumption, resolution, interface (how to connect) define the TFT displays.

The TFT screen itself can’t emit light like OLED display, it has to be used with a back-light of white bright light to generate the picture. Newer panels utilize LED backlight (light emitting diodes) to generate their light and therefore utilize less power and require less depth by design.

Automotive industry has a mixed dynamic in 2021 with the virus resurging in some areas, IC and raw material shortage and high demand. Nevertheless, the automotive supply chain is evolving, Touch Display Research forecasts the supply chain of automotive touch screens, displays, and ADAS will have a revolution in the next 8 years. Your company should be ready for the supply chain revolution.

In the recently published “Automotive Touch, Display, ADAS and Touchless HMI 2021 Report, 4th Edition” Touch Display Research Inc., a market research and consulting firm, analyzes automotive touch screen, display, ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistant System), and touchless human-machine-interaction (HMI) technologies and supply chain. This is the 4th edition with many updates over the third edition (published in 2020). More than 600 companies working on automotive technologies are profiled in the report.

This report mainly covers four parts of the automotive industry: touch, display, ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistant System), and touchless HMI. We also discussed other emerging technologies for automotive, including self-driving vehicles, smart windows, haptic feedback, micro and mini LED lighting, batteries and fuel cells, augmented reality, and virtual reality for the automotive market.

Dr. Colegrove, author of this report, has conducted many first-hand surveys and interviews with touch panel suppliers, display suppliers, touchless sensor suppliers, automotive system integrators, and automotive brand companies in the past 12 years.

The touch for automotive market forecast includes Unit, ASP and Revenue, with a detailed breakdown by projected capacitive touch (discrete), in-cell on-cell, resistive, and other touch technologies.

The display for automotive market forecast includes Unit, ASP and Revenue, with a detailed breakdown by 11 display technologies: quantum dot with blue mini LED backlight LCD, quantum dot with blue regular size LED backlight LCD, white mini LED backlight LCD, conventional TFT LCD, PMLCD or segmented, AMOLED, micro LED direct view, PMOLED+VFD, micro LED HUD, and conventional HUD.

The touchless HMI for automotive market forecast includes Unit, ASP and Revenue, with a detailed breakdown by ADAS ((Advanced Driver Assistant System), gesture control, eye-tracking, voice command, proximity touch, and other touchless technologies.

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Touch Display Research, Inc. (https://TouchDisplayResearch.com) is a technology market research and consulting firm specializing in touch screen and emerging display technologies such as OLED displays, quantum dots, flexible displays, e-paper displays, ITO-replacement, Active pen, near-eye displays, smart windows, micro & mini LED, gesture controls, voice controls, and eye controls. Touch Display Research helps technology companies grow and connecting their technologies to the marketplace. We have been writing about OLED industry for over 10 years. We were the first company to publish Touchless Human-machine-interface report since 2014; we were the first company to publish Quantum Dot market reports since 2013. We were the first company to publish Active Pen market report, and ITO-replacement market report. We have always been there to analyze new and emerging technologies. Touch Display Research provides reports, consulting, and due diligence to touch suppliers, display manufacturers, semiconductor companies, consumer electronics ODMs/OEMs, material suppliers, investors and venture capitalists. For report and consulting, please visit our website: TouchDisplayResearch.com.

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Eve’s crowd development concept is picked from a pool of many start-ups to receive a grant from the Finnish government innovation fund Tekes. With this funding, the groundwork is laid for a project codenamed Pyramid Flipper.

dough.community is launched. The freshly minted community decides fairly quickly that what they want to build is a tablet-first 2-in-1 computer, and that a kickstand is the way to go to keep it upright during use.

As soon as the form factor is decided upon, industrial design partner Propeller gets to work coming up with a number of ways the new device could end up looking. Many more designs and iterations will follow over the coming period as more and more features are locked in by the community.

The community has expressed its preferences for the display, deciding what size, aspect ratio and resolution their ideal portable computer would have. The screen almost will not support pen input, but community members make their voices heard, ensuring a stylus in every box.

A fierce debate is waged on the community forum: should the device come with a powerful and decently energy efficient U-class processor, or with an energy efficient and decently powerful Y-class processor? Ultimately, the much higher battery life of Y wins out over the U’s slightly higher performance.

Some 2-in-1 devices rely on a keyboard module or external dock to gain full connectivity. Not this one! The community decides that the keyboard cover should just be a keyboard and a display cover, and that all the ports should be present on the device itself.

The community expressed its preferences in wireless connectivity, and rules that battery life is a top priority, even at the cost of added size and weight.

Eve establishes a partnership with a Chinese device manufacturer, but this partner soon backs out of the project, citing that the level of detail Eve wants to accomplish is ‘impossible’. Emdoor steps up to the plate, confident that they can take on the challenge and provide the quality Eve has envisioned.

Eve once more ends ahead of fierce competition to receive further funding from Tekes, a Finnish government fund focused on companies with disruptive ideas.

Industrial design partner Propeller and manufacturing partner Emdoor collaborate to make sure the mechanical design of the tablet both works great and looks great. Meanwhile, Emdoor works tirelessly on the electronic design with support from Intel.

Industry giants Intel and Microsoft both pledge testing and engineering support throughout the project to make sure the hardware and software work together as well as possible.

Having been on the hunt for parts since May, the team has finally sourced all necessary parts. For most components needed to build the new device, two or three options are available. The chosen high-end display is only available from one supplier, but Eve is able to contract them.

The overall design of the device is done, though many optimisations and tweaks will follow still as the handmade prototypes are tested more thoroughly than ever.

The first round of manufacturing tools (‘tier 0’) are ready. Molding, casting and milling devices are now ready to create crude prototypes of our device! With every round of production, the tools are refined, and with each round of production the prototypes look and feel better and better.

The Eve V IndieGoGo campaign goes live and produces such traffic that it breaks the IndieGoGo payment processing servers! The originally planned batch of 500 Vs sold out within three hours, and more pre-order spots are quickly made available.

Eve teams up with accessory maker Mozo to crowd-develop protective sleeves for the V. Ultimately, three different designs are offered, and the community gets to pick which one gets made.

Accessory partner Mozo is inspired by the community and decides to put not one, but two of their sleeve designs into production. The V Zipper Sleeve and V Magnetic Sleeve are revealed to the world, and made available for pre-order as part of the IndieGoGo campaign.

The IndieGoGo pre-order campaign comes to an end. The V is a major success, breaking a few crowdfunding records. After the original batch sells out and more Vs are made available, about another 2 000 orders are placed.

An impromptu meet-up brings together nine community- and Eve team members in Helsinki, Finland. No prototypes are available to play with, but a good time is had by all.

It looks like everything in the box is getting community input, even the manual. Many people won’t need a paper user guide, but regulations mandate that we include one. So Eve collaborates with the community to decide what should be in it, and how we can make it as awesome as possible!

The team travels to China, and among other things visits the factory that will produce the V Wireless Keyboards. The CNC-milled unibody housing also gets some attention, to determine the best color for the V.

People have ordered their V from all over the globe, and not everyone is used to typing on an ANSI-US keyboard. Creating small batches of other layouts is a costly endeavour that our manufacturing partners aren’t prepared for. A project is started to determine the best balance between making as many popular keyboard layouts available as possible, and keeping our partners sane.

Eve teams up with Underdog, a company specialised in establishing a brand for start-ups. And since the community is the heart and soul of Eve, Underdog dives straight into surveying what people think and want from a product like the V and a company like Eve. All to get the ‘look and feel’ of Eve just right.

Work at Mozo continues to refine the two sleeve designs for the V. Community feedback is used to make every detail as perfect as possible, allowing the sleeves to protect your V and look good doing it!

The V is refined with the help of prototype testers in the community. With a number of community members getting hands-on time with Vs from various stages of pre-production a list of bugs and improvements soon grows, and the team works tirelessly to make sure every issue is addressed. After coming together to design the V, the community also helps refine it!

Everything is ready to go, and a mini mass production is run. This is the first time the machines that will be mass-producing Vs are, well, producing Vs. Everything goes according to plan and the process is ready to go, but subsequent age and wear testing of the devices points out a major flaw in the displays. Delaying mass production rather than shipping known sub-par quality products, new LCD panels are arranged with the supplier.

The community meets up twice in Germany: First twelve community members get their hands on five prototypes from three different stages of development in Ulm. The alcantara and microfiber versions of the keyboard cover, as well as both the zipper and magnetic sleeves make an appearance, as well as two Eve community managers. And beer. Lots of beer. Later the same month, five community members get their hands on a V prototype and discuss it ‘live’ in Leipzig.

The last known bugs are squashed and the prototypes are thoroughly tested to make sure they comply with all sorts of worldwide regulations – but most of all, to make sure that they comply with the expectations of the community.

The new website goes live, courtesy of design partner Underdog. The new design is bold, focusing on Eve’s intention to disrupt how devices are made. Various graphical elements from the new site are shown in a sneak peak campaign, with daily mysterious messages leading up to the launch. Though this also prepares the website for the web shop, no store is available yet. We do get the entry level price: $ 799 for the entry-level model – and that includes the keyboard cover and pen!

Eve is featured at the Microsoft booth at the Computex 2017 technology trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. What follows is a slew of articles and hands-on first impression videos from a variety of press and influencers, shining a spotlight on the V with much praise and anticipation.

Due to quality control issues with a shipment of LCD panels, there is some delay. With the launch around the corner and the displays being the final piece of the puzzle, there is much pressure to get the V shipped. Eve, however, chooses not to use the sub-par displays, and picks product quality over faster shipping.

Continued failure to meet display quality standards and delivery times leave Eve no option but to explore new sources of display panels. Luckily, recent positive media exposure in the wake of Computex has put Eve on the radar of a number of large display manufacturers. This allows for the purchase of displays without a meddlesome middle man, but also leads to additional delays.

A new partner is found in Japanese display giant Sharp. With the cutting-edge new panel, V will get one of the best displays on the market. The team gets to work testing sample panels to imple