Starting in 1995, Samsung went into full TFT production manufacturing 100,000 units that first year followed by 1 million units through 1997. In the year 2000, Samsung had rolled out their 10-millionth panel and buy 2003 they had reached production of 10 million units.
In terms of the glass substrate sizes, the first line was 370x470mm. The 7-1 Line in Tangjeong today uses the world’s largest mother glass of 1870x2200mm, 24 times larger than in 1995, making it efficient for mass production. Line 7-1 started mass production mainly on 32″ and 40″ panels for large TVs in April this year. Plans are to reach a full-capacity of 60,000 substrates per month by October. The company’s Line 7-2 also will start mass production in the first half of next year.
A lot of moving and shaking has been going on over at Samsung as the company made several large announcements this year. First of all the company announced a couple weeks ago they have developed a 40-inch OLED display. Manufactured on Samsung’s fourth generation (4G) production line with a mother-glass size of 730mm x 920mm this new OLED display features a 5000:1 contrast ratio.
Samsung also announced they would be moving more manufacturing facilities to China in an effort to lower the cost of production.
Below is a list of manufacturing plants which produce TFT LCD displays for Samsung and their overall output:
Reference Data
— Status of Samsung Electronics’ Large TFT-LCD Production
(Cumulative)
(Thousand units)
———————————————————————-
Year 1995 1997 1999 2000 2003 May 2005
———————————————————————-
# of Units 100 1,000 5,000 10,000 50,000 100,000
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-- Status of Samsung Electronics' TFT-LCD Line Operation---------------------------------------------------------------------- Line Site Mass Production Starts Glass Size(mm X mm)---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Kiheung Feb. 1995 370x470---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Kiheung April 1996 550x650---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Cheonan Feb. 1998 600x720---------------------------------------------------------------------- 4 Cheonan Aug. 2000 730x920---------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 Cheonan Sep. 2002 1100x1250---------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 Cheonan Oct. 2003 1100x1300---------------------------------------------------------------------- 7-1 Tangjeong April 2005 1870x2200---------------------------------------------------------------------- 7-2 Tangjeong First-Half, 2006 1870x2200----------------------------------------------------------------------
