John Brewer

After 20 years of commercialization, indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) has proven performance limited and tricky to mass produce for small-to-large-area displays - leaving the promise of IGZO replacing LTPS as much of a dream today at it was in 2000.

The academic researchers who developed IGZO now call for a yet-unknown higher-performance thin film metal oxide semiconductor as the path to improving image quality, reducing the display’s burden on mobile device battery life, and improving display gross margins.

Amorphyx’s work in two areas of thin film electronic devices points to a more obvious path forward. Applying principles from VLSI CMOS FinFET technology to thin film devices, Amorphyx replaces LTPS with its IGZO Amorphous Metal TFT - achieving LTPS mobility levels with stress and reliability performance suitable for AMOLED and microLED.

AMeTFT is a bridge technology - lifting the performance and manufacturability of existing backplane manufacturing techniques. Amorphyx’s groundbreaking work in quantum tunneling field emission conduction - electronic devices without semiconductors - lays the foundation for a new display industry. The Amorphous Metal Nonlinear Resistor (AMNR) LCD developed in collaboration with BOE in 2017 and demonstrated in iZone at SID 2018 defined the future of displays on rigid and flexible substrates - an LCD backplane with no semiconductors capable of holding image quality for 10 minutes without power.

Amorphyx has created a three-stage backplane technology roadmap intersecting with today’s backplane mass production capabilities.

• IGZO AMeTFT replacing LTPS TFTs in rigid and flexible mobile device displays, and enabling >240Hz image refresh rate in LCD, AMOLED and microLED TV
• The “211 pixel”, integrating AMNR and IGZO AMeTFT into a replacement for LTPO that can achieve 0.1Hz-480Hz image refresh rates in an 8-single-tone-mask process
• Replacement of AMeTFT with the Amorphous Metal Hot Electron Transistor (AMHET), a high-speed no-leakage quantum tunneling transistor that integrates into 211.

This roadmap not only enables simple-to-manufacture high-performance display backplanes, it decentralizes display manufacturing through a “roll-up backplane” that can be shipped anywhere for light emitter attachment and final display assembly.