TOKYO -- Screen Holdings is entering the business of building machines for mass-producing OLED panels, in response to growing production of such panels for smartphones in Japan, China and South Korea.

The Kyoto-based company until now has made such systems only for test production. It developed products compatible with sixth-generation substrates, which measure 150-by-185cm, and began supplying them for panel mass production in April.

Screen's systems are used for coating polyimide, the high-performance resin that forms the substrate for OLED panels. They can uniformly coat sixth-generation substrates to a thickness of 10 microns in less than 120 seconds.

The machines prevent foreign substances and bubbles in the resin, and have a defect ratio of less than 10%. They also reduce cleaning costs -- which can run around 20 million yen ($183,000) a month -- by half, enabling smartphone panels to be produced more inexpensively.

The new field is an outgrowth of Screen's main business of systems for producing LCD panels and semiconductors. It has improved nozzles for coating substrates and made them usable even with highly viscous OLED liquids.

(Nikkei)