LinkZill | Enabling access to manufacturing-grade TFT backplanes to accelerate the transition from lab innovations to commercial products
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Introduction
Recent industrial and academic research has produced many optoelectronic materials with improved properties. Perovskite, quantum dot, and 2D materials have enhanced the range of existing organic and inorganic materials suitable for light-emitting diode (LED) or photodetector (PD) applications. Researchers with access to conventional laboratory equipment can produce working demonstrations of individual diodes to characterise properties related to electro-optical performance and therefore select suitable applications where the new materials could be employed. Moving beyond this toward productization for practical applications brings with it a number of challenges, since the use case for the consumer world requires a much more polished demonstration, closer to existing industry standards and quality. The decision by funders to invest further financing into R&D for novel materials is often influenced by a functional prototype incorporating those materials in a display or imaging device. The increase in complexity required to go from single pixels to high-yield arrays with 100,000s of pixels extends far beyond the capability of the equipment sets available to the team that made the material innovation.
Figure. (Left) Perovskite Crystal Structure. (Right) Quantum Dot Emission
Transforming lab results into impressive product-ready prototypes
LED or PD arrays are typically made with pixel counts beyond what may be achieved using simple direct drive connections, such as those used in basic device research. To reduce the number of anode/cathode wires used, a row/column matrix should be employed, where LED pixel signals are updated row by row or PD pixels are read out line by line. In an n-row x m-col array of pixels, the direct wiring connection numbers would be (n x m)+1 whereas the matrix addressing reduces the number to n+m+1. The most common way to make a addressable array is through the use of thin-film transistors (TFTs), with a minimum of two transistors per pixel required for an LED display pixel and one transistor for a PD array pixel (see Figure 1). A small-sized LED display with a resolution of 360 x 360 would require >250 thousand individual TFTs. A PD array of 1024 x 1024 would require over 1 million transistors. Making prototype displays with this number of TFTs is challenging using R&D grade equipment, and due to manual handling of substrates, contact mask defects, and lower grade clean room facilities. Yielding displays containing 100’s of K of transistors without fault requires access to manufacturing-grade facilities containing automated robotic handling, projection lithography, and materials processing in better than class 100 environments.
Figure. (Left) A simple 2T-1C circuit used for addressing emissive displays (LEDs). (Right) A 1T-1C circuit used for addressing photodetector (PD) pixels, where the V_READ signal is measured by a read-out integrated circuit (ROIC)
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LinkZill’s TFT capability for optoelectronics
LinkZill’s purpose is to enable new TFT-based product development by leveraging existing manufacturing capacity from the flat-panel display industry. It works with developers of new optoelectronic technology using its design and knowledge of manufacturing to enable the development of product-ready displays or sensor arrays. Production of the TFT backplanes uses smaller-sized G2.5 to G4.5 lines, which were previously used in the production of displays for consumer electronics. Not only does this ensure high quality and low defectivity, but facilitates the rapid scalability of successful products from pilot production to mass manufacturing, reducing the capital investment required for product development. Products that are qualified on these lines can transition to larger-scale G6 and above lines with short re-qualification times. Even so, the cost of using even the smaller production lines can be prohibitive for start-up businesses or academic researchers. Therefore, LinkZill acts to lower the cost by sharing the photomask area among several customers, much in the same way that multi-party wafers (MPW) in Si CMOS manufacturing divide the cost of production among the number of projects that are combined on the wafer. Such use of the display substrate area has been described as multi-party glass (MPG - see Figure 2) to denote the use of rectangular glass based substrates in TFT manufacturing as opposed to Silicon wafers used in CMOS IC production.
Design of the backplane is a critical factor in demonstrating the beneficial properties of the new materials. Customers have the option to design themselves or to leverage our experience in this area. LinkZill’s industrially trained designers have access to electronic design automation (EDA) tools to help generate the best performance between the optoelectronic component and the TFT backplane. Pixel designs can go beyond the simple 2T-1C for displays by introducing compensation circuits to manage variations over time in the driving of the display component.
A further critical element required for the successful productization of displays or sensor arrays is the ability to address the TFTs through the use of driver electronics. For a display, this takes images or video from a PC or mobile phone and converts the media into the analog signals required to drive the LEDs. For an imager, the electronic readout system measures the currents in each pixel, addressing them in a row-by-row manner, and then forms the image on the computer, representing the amount of radiation (UV, visible, IR, x-ray) received in different areas of the panel. LinkZill has an electronic engineering team dedicated to the development of easy to use driver systems that can be used in R&D and demonstration to show off the best properties of new materials. The critical combination of backplane design, driver system development, and materials understanding ensures that customers achieve the best possible result in the shortest possible time, saving money and allowing opportunities for exploitation to be maximised.
Figure. (Left) LinkZill TFT sensor chip operating with a compatible readout system. (Right) LinkZill TFT display chip operating with a compatible driver system.
LinkZill’s model of MPG has been used successfully for the past 5 years with over 140 companies and 260 top academic groups benefiting from the accelerated development of their ideas into product-ready prototypes. This has resulted in 300 publications in high-impact journals, including 20 in the Science and Nature portfolio. Start-up businesses using the service have achieved follow-on investment and see the access to TFT manufacturing as an important part of their product development and scaling.
Future outlook
Novel optoelectronic materials show great promise to extend the range of types of displays and sensor arrays available on the market. Flexible and large-area format displays and sensor arrays with wavelength tunability through materials design may accelerate application uptake beyond what is currently available. LinkZill is positioned to help companies succeed in this area and provides a significant capability both in-house and through its network of TFT suppliers. Over 60% of staff have Science Masters or PhD education, coupled with industrial experience in TFT design, manufacturing, and materials development. If you have a new promising material or processing technology for optoelectronics and would like to develop a product-ready prototype closer to the end-user application, then please contact us for a no-obligation discussion of how LinkZill may be able to help. We are headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and have offices to support sales and business development in Cambridge, UK, and Hong Kong.
LinkZill can be contacted through the email address info@linkzill.com
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