Samsung Display has reportedly manufactured a limited number of photomasks in house, in order to increase its competitive edge for OLED products. Korean etnews.com reports that Samsung Display hsa finished manufacturing prototypes of photomasks for displays at Samsung Electronics’ photomask and has started mass-producing small amount of those prototypes. To mass-produce these prototypes, Samsung Display purchased a lithography equipment.

Photomask is a necessary material that is used to design circuits during production of displays and semiconductors and is produced by carving a clean disk (blank mask) with electronic circuits after putting it into a stepper. When light is penetrated through a photomask that is placed on top of a display board or a semiconductor wafer, pattern of electronic circuits is formed and it is same principle as a development of a film with pictures.

Although Samsung Display is primarily developing preceding technologies and use photomasks for R&D purposes, the company may increase number of photomasks that it manufactures in the future.

"We decided to manufacture our own photomasks for preceding development of OLEDs and R&D purposes." said a representative for Samsung Display.

"Although we are using these prototypes for actual products, we are not producing significant amount of them and we still lack production capability to mass-produce them."

Since flexible OLEDs use new material such as plastic films rather than previous glass material, knowhow on ability to form TFT pattern is very important. When a business produces its own photomasks, it can optimize technologies on photomasks and related processes.

Another advantage of producing photomasks is that a business can enhance its technologies in the future and prevent its expertise from being leaked.

If the amount of photomasks that is produced increases in the future, a business can also expect to decrease its production cost.

Global photomask manufacturers include HOYA, Toppan Photomask, DNP (Dai Nippon Printing), Photronics, and PKL.