Field Trip to Matsushita’s Amagasaki PDP Factories
September 4th, 2007By Charles Annis, Vice President of FPD Manufacturing Research
On August 23, DisplaySearch Vice President of Japanese TV Market Research Hisakazu Torii and I had the opportunity to meet with Panasonic executives, tour the Matsushita Amagasaki factory, and get a demonstration of the company’s latest PDP technology. Matsushita did an excellent job promoting their PDP technology by explaining that they intend to take advantage of PDP’s self emission to significantly improve color, contrast, lifetime and high brightness/low power consumption. To achieve this, Matsushita will focus on the following four aspects of PDP technology:
- Discharge/Cell Structure: High definition, discharge gas content, discharge mode
- Illumination Structure: Filter design, optimized optical structure, total optical design
- Reduce Circuit Loss: Low power driving, reduce panel capacitance, lower power signal driving
- New Materials: Protective layer, dielectric layer, phosphor material
Pushing PDP technology in these ways will improve contrast and resolution (including moving picture resolution), enable 100% digital cinema color reproduction, offer wide viewing angles, low power consumption and increase life (100,000 hours to half brightness panels are already available)—all at competitive costs.
Presentations were given on the company’s 103” PDP shown below; there were several models in the demo and presentation rooms. This display works well as a public PowerPoint screen, but as the photo below shows, using in a bright room highlights one of PDP’s weaknesses: high reflection of ambient light.
Panasonic 103” PDP
Matsushita has five PDP factories now in mass production: one in China, two in Ibaraki, Japan, and two in Amagasaki, Japan. They are planning a third factory in Amagasaki that will use very large substrates capable of producing 12-up 42” equivalent PDPs. The new fab is expected to move equipment in around November 2008 and start mass production in May 2009.
We were given a tour of the first Amagasaki factory, which is producing 6-up 42” PDPs. Below is a photograph of the 1664 × 1961 mm glass substrate used on this line. Matsushita has their glass substrates produced to the exact size of the number up, so glass efficiency is nearly 100%.
6-Up 42” PDP Mother Glass Reflecting the Tour Group
The line was running at maximum utilization, producing Full HD 1080p 42” TV modules at a rate of about one panel per minute. The line is highly automated with only a few humans inside the fab performing inspection. Yield is higher than 90%.
In the factory showroom, we got to see some great looking PDPs and comparisons with other technologies. In Japan, Matsushita is now offering PDPs with anti-glare and anti-reflection coatings on the optical filter. We dropped a metal ball on the front glass of a PDP generating 1 Joule of force without breaking the front glass. Seeing is believing to appreciate the high moving picture resolution when comparing 1080p, 720p and 60 Hz LCD panels. But for me, the improved lumen per Watt display was the most interesting demonstration. Current Panasonic PDPs offer around 2 lumens per Watt, but working with the Advanced PDP Development Center, Matsushita is targeting to increase efficiency to 10 lumens per Watt in the next several years. This can potentially enable 32” 1080p PDPs, eliminate one of the upper electrodes and one of the driver boards, reduce the number of process steps substantially, and reduce address voltage, EMI, driver IC and optical filter costs; in sum, this reduces total costs as much as 33%. Although multiple manufacturing challenges remain, and mass production of 10 lumens per Watt PDPs may still be several years off, the company suggested that incremental efficiency improvements will start to be commercialized from 2008 and that more substantial improvements would be productized in 2009. Higher brightness, greater contrast and excellent color reproduction were all clearly visible in the higher lumen per Watt demo.
Over the past year, several newspaper articles and rumors suggested that Matsushita is considering giving up its is PDP strategy and jumping on the LCD bandwagon—that they might cancel the planned 12-up fab and buy into the LG.Philips joint venture. LCDs continue to improve in quality, reduce costs, move into larger and larger TV and public display segments, and will certainly dominate FPD units and revenues for as long as we can forecast. Considering this, many people in the LCD industry have suggested that Matsushita cannot be competitive in a market constantly being squeezed by LCDs, that equipment and materials makers won’t continue to support them because the market is too small and that TVs are too important to Matsushita for them to bet on a technology that is apparently losing ground to LCDs.
Even though I have been a Japanophile since 1990, I still often struggle to understand “honne” or real intention vs. “tatemae” or outward appearance. But what I took away from our field trip to Amagasaki is that Matsushita has a lot of pride in its PDP technology, they efficiently produce some of the highest performance FPD TV panels in the world, and they believe that they can continue to lower costs while improving on-screen performance to make PDPs both highly competitive and profitable. I interpret that as “honne,” that Matsushita will push its PDP strategy, moving ahead to build the world’s largest 12-Up 42” PDP fab, starting construction from this fall.
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