An alternative to Thin Film Transistor to bring green display manufacturing in Europe
All the electronic displays sold in the EU use panels manufactured in Asia.
In addition to drastically limiting the European resilience, this leads to a lack of control and vision on materials and processes used in display manufacturing and therefore on their environmental impacts.
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) and Organic LED (OLED) displays are today’s leading technologies. The liquid crystal matrix or OLEDs are driven by a Thin Film Transistor (TFT) array covering the whole display size. The photolithography process used for TFT manufacturing is extremely energy consuming and makes use of Super fluorinated greenhouse gasses. Besides, each TFT factory require an investment of a few billion euros. This makes their relocation in Europe not competitive with existing factory in Asia.
Thin Film Transistor (TFT) array are a major technological lock for the manufacture of greener display in Europe.
To rid display manufacturing of TFT, the BAMBAM project will develop and implement an Additive Manufacturing process based on active μLED pixels and microprinting of electrical and optical structures. In contrast to OLED or Liquid Crystal matrices, active μLED pixels include their own driver thus eliminating the need for a TFT panel.
In 2016, a GEN 6 factory for TFT-LCD panels consumed as much electrical power as half of Grenoble, the home city of the μLEDs used in BAMBAM. Today’s GEN 10 factories likely consume more! Credit: Matthieu Riegler, CC-by 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
New greener display applications unlocked.
Because they filter the light produced by a backlight unit, LCD displays are extremely energy inefficient. In its time, the advent of OLED technology resulted in a 30% reduction in power consumption compared to LCD. The active μLED technology developed in BAMBAM will further reduce this power consumption while being much brighter.
In LCD and OLED displays, the TFT is generally built on glass substrate. Among other disadvantages, TFT on glass substrates are associated with power losses reaching up to 70% and the impossibility to design flexible displays or seamless Video walls made of assembled displays. The microprinting technology developed in BAMBAM will enable to build display on different substrate than glass. This will open the door to greener flexible displays or video walls with a very fine pitch and high brightness.
BAMBAM Objective
BAMBAM will bring together 7 European leaders in their respective fields to develop and demonstrate an additive manufacturing process for displays. The demonstration of BAMBAM concept will be realised through the production of two demonstrators based on active μLED pixels and microprinting of electrical and optical structures.
To reduce the environmental impact of its displays all across their life cycle, the project will follow an Eco design approach monitored by regular Life Cycle Assessments. Barco, a large company providing displays to several B2B markets and a BAMBAM partner, will apply its Eco Score methodology to further evaluate the performance of BAMBAM demonstrators.
Acknowledgments
BAMBAM has received funding up to 4.29 M€ from Horizon Europe under the Topic HORIZON-CL4-2021-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-31 – Functional electronics for green and circular economy (RIA). The project is funded under the Grant Agreement N° 101070085
The 2-years project will run from the 1st of September 2022 until the 31st of August 2024
Link towards CORDIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101070085