Our TCZ reporting segment develops, integrates, markets and supports silicon crystallization tools used in the manufacture of LTPS—LCD and OLED displays. The global display industry is driven by the high performance displays used in everyday consumer products, including televisions, smart phones, tablets, notebook computers and personal computer monitors. Consumer demand requires that displays of the future will need to be brighter, and have richer, more vivid colors, faster video capability, added functionality such as touch screen and scanning capability, wider viewing angles, and work well in sunlight and be more durable, all at a lower cost. To meet these growing market demands and advance the volume-production capabilities of displays, we developed an innovative production technology for fabricating displays.

Silicon crystallization is a key step in the manufacturing process for many types of high-resolution LTPS—LCD and OLED displays. A glass plate, coated with a thin film of amorphous silicon, is exposed to a high-power laser that converts the silicon into a poly-crystalline form, which is then used to create the pixel control circuit. Our silicon crystallization tool uses a 900W laser with advanced beam shaping optics to form a very narrow line focus that is 730 mm long, allowing a generation 4 size glass plate (730 mm x 920 mm) to be processed in a single pass. TCZ’s latest product processes generation 5 size glass plates (1,300 mm x 1,500 mm) using two passes. This approach is designed to produce very uniform crystalline silicon material across the entire glass plate, which is needed to support the high-performance circuitry on the high-resolution LTPS—LCD and OLED that controls the picture elements, or pixels. We believe our silicon crystallization tools will deliver high throughput and panel uniformity and reduce the cost of silicon crystallization for display manufacturers.