Only a 0.2mm thick metal mask passes through the conveyor belt and slowly slides into the vacuum chamber. After more than 20 hours of sputtering treatment, it is sent to the client company for the production of flexible mobile phone screens.
On the morning of November 23, on the TWQY production line, Cai Zonghong, an expert from Taiwan, China, wore clean clothes and worked intensively on the production line.
"TFE CVD metal mask is a key component of the flexible screen film packaging process. In the past, it was 100% in the hands of Korean manufacturers. Now, we can also produce it independently." Cai Zonghong introduced that the production line has been successfully trial-produced and the product specifications It is fully up to the standard and is currently cooperating with China's OLED head companies BOE, Tianma, and Huaxing Optoelectronics for trial production and sample delivery.
Flexible screens generally refer to flexible OLED screens. Because of their low power consumption and bendable characteristics, they are widely used in smart phones and wearable devices. Compared with ordinary screens, the biggest change in flexible screens is to replace the glass substrate with a plastic-like substrate film. For the masks used to make this layer of film, for a long time, they could only rely on South Korean imports, and faced problems such as long delivery cycles and priority supply of masks to Samsung and LG.
In order to solve this market "bottleneck problem", TWQY Electronic Applied Materials Technology Group invested and built a factory in mainland China in 2017, dedicated to the development and mass production of CVD metal masks.
Foreign technology blockade restrictions force companies to strive to achieve independent and controllable core technologies. In the fourth quarter of 2019, TWQY began trial production. At the end of September this year, the TFE CVD Mask production line completed equipment debugging and trial production, and the mass-produced product quality and specifications reached or exceeded international standards.
According to reports, China's OLED production capacity accounts for about 40% of the global market. With the growth of the domestic OLED market, the demand for metal masks is expected to double next year.