October 28, 2003

Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd. recently developed a laser annealing system which satisfies ever growing needs for low temperature poly-silicon TFT LCD with large screen.

SHI turned into reality a new laser annealing system enabling the irradiation of long beams of 730 mm.This system adopts a completely new excimer laser technology by a French firm SOPRA featuring a long pulse width and very high-energy stability. SHI's own optical technology was combined with that technology to realize the system.

It is now possible to irradiate the whole board area at a single scan to the 4th generation glass substrate by realizing long laser beams which are the longest in the industry and two times longer than such achieved by conventional machines. This will certainly contribute to realizing ever larger screen, such as 32 inch large screen TV's, whereas the poly-silicon TFT LCD were primarily used for small to medium size screens. This system, further, enjoys the advantage of gaining 1.3 times higher productivity when the system will be used for producing displays of the current size. Also, it has a further advantage that there are high degrees of flexibility in product size to be cut.

SHI now completed a prototype unit at its Yokosuka Works and sampling tests using the prototype unit will be made available to customers in December 2003.The system will be released for sales in April 2004.