MAKE: Blog: Mother of all glass substrates

Mother of all glass substrates

Sharp Substrate Wow
I like Bunnie's pick @ CES (Bunnie is an engineer, worked on Chumby also on the MAKE advisory board. CES is the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, USA) -

The most stunning thing I saw at CES this year was no gadget, however. It was a mock-up of the “motherglass” substrate that Sharp uses to make its 57″ LCD panels. That is indeed the mother of all glass substrates. There’s these huge frickin machines somewhere out there in this world that takes in that 9 foot piece of glass and deposits thin films of silicon on it, and images microscopic patterns into the films to make all those big, beautiful hi def LCD displays that the gadget freaks lust after. I lust after the machine that makes those panels–eight 57″ LCDs panels at a time. It makes those 12″ wafers at the Intel booth look well…small.

Mother of all glass substrates - Link.

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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: shawn on January 9, 2008 at 7:16 PM

reminds me of the 2 ton skids of 8ft x 8 ft sheets of raw glass I used to computer and hand cut for windows and such...we used a air table and just pulled each sheet down and let it "flop" on the bed of air, its wild. Id guess that they cut it down and then make the individual panels...it

Posted by: mkb on January 9, 2008 at 7:16 PM

Transparent aluminum is a reality!

Posted by: er0ck on January 10, 2008 at 8:06 AM

i'm sure bunnie knows this very well, but his wafer comment really isn't fair. that glass doesn't have to be a single, (nearly) defect free crystal, as the 300mm wafers do. I agree that huge piece of glass is cool just because of what the machines can deposit onto it. but silicon wafers have several DECADES and orders of magnitude more money behind them. indeed they are also what allow that shiney LCD to operate at all.

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