IGNIS Launches Electrical Inspection System for AMOLED Display Manufacturing

Waterloo, Canada – May 20, 2013 – IGNIS Innovation Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of MaxLife™ Inspection, an all-electrical inspection system for AMOLED display manufacturing lines. It provides detailed data on display defects which can then be repaired using a laser, improving yield 2-5 times.

Flat panel displays are typically inspected with an optical camera. The precision is limited, and it only identifies a stuck-on or stuck-off pixel, but not the cause. MaxLife Inspection uses a probe card, custom measurement electronics, and MaxLife Viewer software to measure every pixel with 14-bit resolution.
MaxLife Inspection can be used at two points in the manufacturing process:

1. First, the display is measured after Thin Film Transistor (TFT) fabrication but before OLED deposition. The software shows a map of the entire display, highlighting each defective pixel and its failure mode (gate-source short, open channel, etc.). This data is then used for laser-cutting or depositing new metal to repair the defect.

2. The system measures the display again after OLED deposition to identify OLED defects. That data can be used to repair shorted pixels and anode-cathode contact shorts.

Line monitoring and process ramp-up is faster and more effective with MaxLife Inspection. Instead of taking random samples off the production line for measurement, The MaxLife Viewer software already has statistics, graphs, and reports for every single TFT and OLED that comes off the line.

Even if a pixel isn’t defective, it can still have uniformity problems resulting in stripes, speckles, or cloudiness in the display known as “Mura”. The measurement data for each pixel (collected during TFT and OLED inspection) can be loaded into a lookup table, and the IGNIS MaxLife algorithm completely corrects the Mura.

“The MaxLife Inspection system works with oxide, polysilicon, and amorphous silicon TFT backplanes,” says Reza Chaji, President and CTO. “The technology and algorithms are based off IGNIS’s proven MaxLife technology, but it doesn’t need IGNIS’s pixel circuit – it’s compatible with any type of AMOLED”.
Systems are currently available to order.