VTechnology Revenues Soar Despite Down Year for FPD Equipment
By Charles Annis – Vice President, Manufacturing Research, DisplaySearch
On November 26, Japanese FPD specialty equipment maker VTechnology announced that revenue for the first half of the Japanese fiscal year (April through September) was up 198.9% versus the previous year. Operating profit reached 20.2%, the best quarter on record since the company was founded. Plus the company still has a backlog of more than JPY 12.7 billion (US$146.8 million)! These are very impressive numbers, particularly when you consider that the rest of the TFT LCD equipment industry is suffering its worst contraction ever, with 2009 spending down 50% compared to last year.
How is a small inspection and repair company bucking the trend in such a big way? The main reason is the first mass production design win for VTech’s EGIS (Exposure Guided by Inspection System) alternative lithography tool. VTech announced EGIS orders on May 7, 2009 for JPY 5 billion (US$57.8 million), on May 21 for JPY 4.5 billion (US$52.0 million) and October 13 for JPY 5 billion (US$57.8 million): totaling JPY 14.5 billion (US$167.6 million).
Although it has not been publicly announced, it is widely known that Sharp adopted the EGIS platform for patterning the alignment layer of its proprietary new UV²A optical alignment process being applied at both the Kameyama Gen 8 line and the new Sakai Gen 10 line. EGIS uses a unique real-time imaging technology to align masks to actual features already patterned on the substrates. This offers good alignment performance and enables the use of multiple small low-cost masks and scanning architecture that minimizes exposure related defects. EGIS can offer the same benefits to multiple color filter exposure steps, and VTech is hoping the that during the next round of investment RGB patterning will prove as lucrative as the optical alignment segment has been.
You have to give VTechnology a lot of credit for investing tens of millions of dollars and years of R&D into an unproven technology. The company’s core business of inspection and repair has increasingly come under heavy margin pressure as many local Korean and Taiwanese companies have entered the market. VTech took this as a challenge to use its core technology as a pole to vault out of the crowded inspection and repair market and over the high barrier to entry lithography market. It took on a high risk project to successfully develop an alternative, low-cost option to conventional high cost projection and proximity exposure. VTech’s current success proves that equipment companies that develop innovative technologies that help LCD makers improve performance, increase productivity or lower costs can still be highly successful even as the LCD matures-and even in a down year.
