The last ten years have seen flat displays conquer our briefcases, desktops, and living rooms. There has been an enormous development in production technology, not least in lithography and photomasks. Current masks for large displays are more than 2 m² and make 4-6 1X prints on glass substrates that are 9 m². One of the most challenging aspects of photomasks for displays is the so called mura, stripes or blemishes which cause visible defects in the finished display. For the future new and even tighter maskwriter specifications are driven by faster transistors and more complex pixel layouts made necessary by the market's wish for still better image quality, multi-touch panels, 3D TVs, and the next wave of e-book readers. Large OLED screens will pose new challenges. Many new types of displays will be lowcost and use simple lithography, but anything which can show video and high quality photographic images needs a transistor backplane and sophisticated masks for its production.

Date Published: 15 May 2010
PDF: 18 pages
Proc. SPIE 7545, 26th European Mask and Lithography Conference, 75450K (15 May 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.865780

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7545:
26th European Mask and Lithography Conference
Uwe F.W. Behringer; Wilhelm Maurer, Editor(s)