After Decade of Development, Cymer Moves Into OLED Display Manufacturing

When San Diego-based Cymer (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYMI]]) announced its first-quarter financial results last month, the company noted almost parenthetically that it’s just beginning to roll out technology to manufacture OLED display screens.

In the 24 years since it was founded, Cymer’s business has been focused almost entirely on making advanced lasers that serve as the light sources in the photolithography process used in semiconductor manufacturing. The ability of Intel, AMD, and other semiconductor makers to produce chips with smaller and smaller microcircuit designs is due in part to Cymer’s ability to make lasers that produce light at ever-tighter wavelengths. The company now has about 3,300 lasers operating in semiconductor plants around the world; its most advanced lasers, which cost about $1.7 million apiece, are sold to ASML, Canon, and Nikon for integration into scanners—the big machines used to put microcircuits on silicon wafers.

Cymer logoCymer’s success in keeping pace with chipmakers has given the company a commanding global market share, and Cymer spokesman Blake Miller says Japan’s Gigaphoton is its only remaining competitor. As a semiconductor tool supplier, however, Cymer has faced an extraordinarily volatile market. In the winter of 2008-09, for example, Cymer laid off at least a third of its worldwide workforce as the recession deepened. Cymer has long needed another business to dampen the vicious swings of its core semiconductor business.

So it was noteworthy, to say the least, when Cymer said its TCZ display division has installed its first system for making ultrathin OLED displays at the facilities of an unnamed customer in South Korea. While the first system undergoes integration and testing, Cymer says it plans to deliver its second OLED manufacturing system to another unnamed customer in China by the end of October.

OLED technology itself has been 20 years in the making, according to David Knowles, a 12-year Cymer veteran who now heads the company’s TCZ division.

Knowles says one of the key innovations underlying TCZ’s OLED technology is a process that creates a uniform grid of transistors on the semiconducting material that forms a

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.