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Traditional control charts, such as Hotelling’s T 2 , are effective in detecting abnormal patterns. However, most control charts do not take into account a time-varying property in a process. In the present study, we propose a parameter-less self-organizing map-based control chart that can handle a situation in which changes occur in the distribution or parameter of the target observations. The control limits of the proposed chart are determined by estimating the empirical level of significance on the percentile using the bootstrap method. Experimental results obtained by using simulated data and actual process data from the manufacturing process for a thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the appearance of the Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display (AM-LCD) in 1995, flat panel display has been the fast growing industry during two decades [1] . Now LCD became the most dominant display technology world-wide. The flat panel display glass also has walked together along with the LCD industry. Great difficulties for manufacturing the flat panel display glass have given high entry barriers for the leading 3 companies: Corning, Asahi and NEG. These 3 companies occupy about 95% share of the flat panel display glass market [2] . However, these days, new players struggle to take significant part in the market. In this paper the detailed technological difficulties are analyzed. Display industry, however, these days in the turmoil of the big change. Plasma display panel (PDP) has not been displayed in the exhibitions or showcases. LCD is going through the mature stage of the industrial life cycle. Lots of ownership change and M&A have reported in the news. After that OLED and lots of touch application gadget appeared in the market. Even though these new devises also use flat glasses, the required attributes are different from those of LCD. The differentiation is important topic in the display industry. Flexible display is interesting theme in both glass and display field. Even though final product appears as a thin plastic display [3] , all the manufacturing process happens on the glass substrates. In spite of the drastic change of the display industry, the glass production shows continuous growth. The need of larger screen does not show the saturation. The popularity of touchable hand held devices could continue in near future [4] . However all these situations are not the gospel for the glass industry. The display companies in the red ocean, push down the price of the glass with tremendous pressure. So in near future flat panel display glass also needs breakthrough for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Color Filters (CF) is a critical module of TFT-LCD industry whose products are widely applied to the customer electronics products. Since the color filters manufacturing stays in the 1-tier enterprise of the supply network of the TFT-LCD industry, its logistics planning is quite complex. This paper develops a LP-based planning method to support the logistics of a color filter manufacturing company. This developed planning model focuses on the mid-term planning, considering the issues in terms of production and material requirement planning in an integrated way. For application, this developed method is implemented by the optimization software LINGO and then integrated to the database system as decision support. To test the quality of this method, 52 weeks of real factory data are studied, and the validation result shows a variation less than 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the approaches of liquid crystal display (LCD) industry to address the issues of manufacturing strategies and yield management practices. The display market is dominated by LCD technology, which is used in computer monitors and televisions (TV). The LCD factories use technologies that are similar to semiconductor firms for processing thin film transistors. Furthermore, yield management strategies are driven by high resolution requirements for monitors and TV displays.

The ability to improve yield in the manufacturing process is an important competitiveness determinant for LCD factories. The TFT-LCD contains three major manufacturing sectors: the array, cell, and module assembly processes. The yield loss from the cell process is one of the most critical steps. To increase the cell process yield, more conforming LCD panels must be produced from one glass substrate. The sorter is a robot used in LCD manufacturing systems to achieve higher yield for matching TFT and CF plates. This sorter contains several ports that can transfer CF glasses from CF cassettes to match TFT glasses. In this paper, the Hungarian method is applied to solve the yield-mapping problem with the sorter. This method provides an optimal solution to improve the cell process yield . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]