Flatvision Industry News

According to display market research, average selling prices for TVs are expected to be down in Q4 2009 for the first time since the flat-panel TV transition began, and TV manufacturers are developing a wide variety of design elements and performance features to differentiate products and slow price declines.

A key aspect in development of the above-mentioned differentiation is the interplay of performance, capabilities, cost, and power consumption. Most features and performance improvements carry cost premiums and increased power consumption, but intelligent design and utilization of new technologies may enable simultaneous improvements. Key examples of this trend are LED backlights and 240Hz frame rate operation in LCD TVs.

Research indicates that LED backlighting and 240Hz LCDs will serve as an enabling technology for new feature developments in TVs in 2010, specifically for 3-D TVs, an area of intense interest to TV manufacturers.

Power consumption is also becoming an increasingly important issue in consumer electronics, with energy regulations increasing in all regions — most recently in California. LED backlighting will continue to serve as a critical enabler of reduced power consumption. In the “Q4′09 Quarterly TV Design and Features Report,” energy regulations are examined with detailed descriptions of national regulations and ‘point of sale’ labeling policies.

(See full article at: www.informationdisplay.org)

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Manufacturing companies taking a stronger environmental line these days do so because it’s good for public relations, good for business, good for the soul and also because they are required to do so, if not now, in the near future.

Many regulations, mostly from the European Union, are making it necessary for businesses to take a harder look at their supply chains.With some exceptions, companies in the United States haven’t had to do this to the extent that their overseas partners have: “All the toughest legislation comes out of Europe or California these days,” says Kimberly Allen, principal of Pañña Consulting. But as a practical matter, any company that wants to do business globally, and that includes most display companies, has to make sure that its products comply with EU rules. New legislation from other parts of the world Asia, for example is also in the works, and old legislation is constantly changing. RoHS, which went into effect July 2006, is currently being updated, as is REACH. These directives will only become more stringent.

Below is a short list of the environmental legislation most likely to affect display manufacturers. The accompanying web addresses contain more information about specifics, deadlines, and exemptions.

RoHS stands for Restriction of Hazardous Substances. The directive originated in the European Union and restricts the use of specific materials found in electrical and electronic products: lead mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers. http://www.rohs.gov.uk/

Since RoHS covers every component of a product, manufacturers need to know who made which components and where each component was made. “Some little pushbutton in your phone might have been made in one country and gone through two or three different factories in other countries,” before it ends up in a finished handset, notes Allen.

REACH, Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemical Substances, is an EU directive that came into force in 2007, but is being phased in over a period of years. Like RoHS, it requires manufacturers to know the origin and contents of their products. Unlike RoHS, it does not ban substances (although it calls for progressive substitution of the most dangerous ones) but asks that all listed materials, harmful or not, be cataloged in a database. “RoHS involves six substances,” says Allen. “REACH deals with 10,000 to 20,000.” Whoever is deemed responsible for the product, usually the OEM, she notes, will need to maintain the necessary database. Manufacturers will be expected to be in full compliance with REACH by 2011 or 2012, she estimates. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/reach/reach_intro.htm

WEEE, another piece of legislation from the EU, is the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Act, in force since 2003. Unlike RoHS and REACH, “It’s more about the end of life of a product,” says Allen. WEEE was designed to promote collection schemes for the recycling of electronic equipment, although it also requires that heavy metals and certain other chemicals be phased out of products. The directive sets targets for collecting and recycling, and places the onus, for the most part, on manufacturers.

Certainly end of life is a challenge for the entire industry. Even cell phones, which might seem, on account of their portability, to be easy for customers to recycle, represent a lot of potentially hazardous waste. According to Allen, only about 10% to 11% of cell phones in the U.S. are currently recycled. “The rest end up in desk drawers or in landfills,” she says. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/weee/index_en.htm

Electronic Waste Recycling Act. This 2003 legislation out of California also has to do with end of life. Key elements of the ruling include a reduction in hazardous substances used in certain electronic products sold in the state, collection of an electronic waste recycling fee at the point of sale, and distribution of recovery and recycling payments to qualified entities handling the cost of electronic waste collection and recycling. http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/electronics/Act2003/

EuP stands for Energy-using Products, and is yet another EU directive (finalized in 2005 but not yet enacted) and is aimed at encouraging environmentally friendly design before the supply chain even gets exercised.

“It requires DfE (Design for Environment) to have occurred before you make the product,” says Allen, who adds that it will involve some kind of stamp that can be displayed by approved products. http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/eco_design/index_en.htm

Environmental legislation has already changed the way business is done in many areas of display manufacturing, and it will continue to do so in greater and greater measure. Some of the challenges are daunting: cataloging all the substances under the REACH directive, for example, will take time and cause some pain. Allen believes, however, that the end result will be positive. Companies will have a better knowledge of their supply chain and closer relationships with suppliers. “I think it has the potential to harmonize the supply chain,” she says.

A question on some people’s minds at least in the U.S. is, “Do companies really have to comply yet?” The answer is, “In most cases, yes.” Admittedly, enforcement and penalties aren’t standardized, and in some cases have been phased in over time. And there are exemptions, such as for medical equipment. But the processes of detection and enforcement are becoming more rather than less rigorous and legislative overhauls will provide for fewer exemptions as time goes on.

What actually happens if a company is discovered to be in violation of a directive depends on where the detection takes place. In the case of the EU directives, for example, it is up to individual countries to achieve results, and the EU does not dictate the methodology. Checking for compliance might mean requesting documents in one instance. It could mean physical checks with handheld XRF (X -Ray Fluorescence) analyzers in another. Or both. Penalties vary as well. For non-compliance with WEEE/RoHS, examples include a fine of 300,000 Forints (about $1600 US) in Hungary to a maximum penalty of 15 million Euros and 10 years in prison in Ireland. Fines have been levied in Europe, and products recalled. In practical terms, however, perhaps the biggest setbacks for non-complying companies are sales bans, loss of contracts, and negative publicity. Companies are starting to prefer to do business with companies that are compliant. The negative aspects of getting caught not complying seem to outweigh any financial and practical benefits of avoiding compliance.

One of the biggest challenges to companies in terms of compliance is end-of-life legislation. Manufacturers are going to have to figure out how to collect and recycle (and induce customers to recycle) their products on a global basis without losing money. Some cross-company collaboration efforts are already being made in this area, and of course recycling represents a new opportunity for third parties willing to figure out the logistics. The upcoming final installment in this series of green manufacturing news articles will look at end-of-life issues and the practical solutions some companies and organizations are proposing and enacting.

(See article at: http://www.informationdisplay.org)

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Forget about video ads in printed magazines, in the future newsagents’ shelves and newspaper stands may be filled with complete video publications. Researchers from the Riken Center in Japan claim to have developed a technique that can manufacture OLED as cheaply as printing a newspaper. The development was announced by Japanese research organisation, Riken Research.

The researchers acknowledge that the electrospray-deposition technique they are using isn’t new but claim their revolutionary ‘dual solvent’ technique improves the method to produce polymer films to a point where they can compete with other fabrication techniques.

In an article titled ‘Smoothing the way to superior screens’, the method is described as “a double-solvent concept” that makes “electrospray-deposited films smoother than before, thereby enabling superior devices to built”.

Yutaka Yamagata, of the Riken Centre for Intellectual Property Strategies, was quoted as saying: “We have discovered a range of conditions using a two-solvent method that can make extremely smooth thin films using electoscopy deposition. Using this technology these devices could be manufactured as inexpensively as printing newspapers.”

(See article: http://www.inavateonthenet.net)

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Whether a company manufactures toothpicks or twin-engine aircraft, that company is almost certainly “greening up” its operations these days or at least thinking about it. Such efforts run the gamut from simple changes like using long-life light bulbs to major transformations such as overhauling production lines. For the display industry, green efforts that go beyond general operations include making products more energy-efficient, utilizing better packaging, replacing environmentally hazardous materials with more benign ones, and using less wasteful manufacturing methods.

Top of the list for these companies is probably making products more energy efficient. This initiative is driven as much by customer demand as by other factors, according to Kimberly Allen, principal of the San Jose-based Pañña Consulting. Allen recently completed an environmental issues survey of display manufacturers for market research company iSuppli Corp. Seventy-three percent of the 520 survey respondents reported that energy efficiency of products was a priority. “This tends to be aligned with a company’s goals anyway,” says Allen, “because consumers expect that every year, battery life will increase.” In order to meet these goals, companies are continually optimizing the backlighting, glass, and other components of displays so that they will drain batteries less. Just one example across much of the industry has been the gradual replacement of CCFL backlighting with more energy-efficient LEDs.

Packaging is another major focus for environmental initiative. Although displays are fragile, thoughtful packaging design can protect equipment while also minimizing environment impact and helping the bottom line: “If you can pack 500 TVs into a shipping crate instead of 300, you’ve saved quite a bit,” notes Allen.

Removing hazardous materials from displays is also an ongoing effort at many companies. Allen’s survey revealed that 80% of respondents are working on replacing these materials with less harmful ones. Here again, the replacement of CCFLs, which contain mercury, with LEDs is a step in the environmentally friendly direction.

Other efforts at reducing the environmental impact of display-making include solution-based processing techniques that can be performed at lower temperatures than traditional deposition methods “without all those heaters and pumps going,” says Allen. This process can be wasteful as well, noting that the trick is to collect and reuse the solutions. If that can be worked out, then companies reap the benefits of dramatically lower energy bills.

In fact while companies tend to be motivated to go green for multiple reasons, among them the urge to do the right thing and gain the appreciative eye of the consumer, the chance to cut costs may be the most powerful. However, Allen notes that green manufacturing only really saves money when it is carefully and proactively implemented. “The smarter companies have figured out to go upstream, and use Design-for-Environment (DfE) practices,”. “It does require a bit of strategic investment.” Companies that implement “end of pipeline” changes may find those very expensive indeed.

There is yet another factor behind the greening of display manufacturing: legislation both current and pending. Companies must be careful to comply with increasingly stringent environmental regulations both in the U.S. and abroad . The next installation in this series of news articles will focus on legislation such as the EU’s ROHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) and WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) that are affecting the way display companies do business now and in the future.

(See article: http://www.informationdisplay.org)

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