As the launch date of iPhone 8 is approaching, the automation equipment market of apple industry chain is also facing the hot demand.Xiaobian special summary of the industry experts and investors for this market views and views for your reference.

1. In 2016, the global OLED has reached a scale of 10 billion, at present, samsung can be said to be the only one with a market share of 90%. Apple iPhone8 also USES samsung's OLED.Domestic OLED manufacturers are also producing OLED screens on a large scale, but it may take some time to industrialize, and mass production of OLED screens is likely to occur after mid-2019.

2. It is estimated that the output value of OLED industry will reach one trillion market and one hundred billion devices by 2019 or 2020.The equipment process is mainly divided into front section, middle section and back section.The front equipment, that is, the equipment to enlarge the substrate before evaporation, accounts for 70% of the equipment, which is very difficult, and is provided by foreign semiconductor equipment suppliers.Middle equipment accounts for 15%, the most core is the evaporation machine, currently mainly provided by Canon Japan.At present, what domestic enterprises can do is 15% of the back section, such as laser cutting equipment, hot bending machine and testing equipment.

3. It is estimated that OLED will transition from 2.5d hard screen to 3D hard screen and then to soft screen in the next few years.Smartphone screens will evolve in six directions, including extremely thin, extremely light, extremely narrow, extremely cool, and extremely soft.In order to ensure the quality, more testing equipment will be used.

4. SMT industry, represented by SMT SMT machine, saw a year-on-year growth of nearly 40% in the first quarter. The reasons for the hot SMT market since the beginning of this year are as follows: 1.2) the demand of other EMS industries other than smart phones is good;3) the development cycle of the industry itself.

Specific viewpoint analysis:

I. intelligent screen detection expert

1. Mobile phone technology development trend

Since the iPhone came out, the overall development of mobile phone has been six poles: 1) extremely thin;2) extremely light;3) extremely narrow, that is, the gap is getting narrower and narrower. Compared with apple phones, huawei phones have relatively rough workmanship, apple phones have relatively small gap, and xiaomi is even worse than huawei.4) extremely cold, related to the battery, to ensure that the phone is cool when working, because the fever is prone to some accidents;5) extremely soft, that is, the mobile phone is curved and flexible, and the mobile phone can also be folded and bent in the future;6) the ultimate appearance is the mobile phone's beautiful appearance and better experience.The whole mobile phone technology is developed according to these six limits.

2. Take the panel industry as an example to discuss the requirements of 3C visual testing

(1) use the panel as an example to illustrate the requirements of visual detection

From the smallest watch screen to mobile phone screen, and then to the big TV can be about 100 inches, the screen industry is a very big industry.But by far the most popular is the smartphone screen, which has the most volume.

There are many defect detection requirements.

First, after the completion of the internal circuit of the mobile phone, there may be some broken or short circuit, to detect it;

Second, some protection glass can have scratch and bump, do not affect the use but not beautiful, this also should detect;

Third, to do a screen check, that is, the front panel display.

The screen actually needs to go through a relatively long processing process, the first step is cutting (generally speaking, the fifth generation line and the tenth generation line are divided by the size of the glass substrate, the large substrate needs to be cut into small panels corresponding to the screen of a mobile phone, computer or TV), after cutting the need to check the screen, such as whether there are defects and so on.The second step is to stick the polarizer, the third step is to add a backlight module, and finally stick the cover plate glass to form the LCM mold component.Companies such as boe, huaxing optoelectronics, CLP panda, au optronics, chimei and sharp will stop there. The display module LCM is sold to mobile phone manufacturers such as huawei, apple OPPO and so on.

Every step of the chain here needs to be checked.Why do Japanese companies locate their factories in China?In fact, the automatic processing equipment has been automated, but it requires a large number of testing personnel, and every step needs people.The screen comes out every 3.5 s, it is actually very tired to rely on the manual look, can not guarantee the quality, need automation.So the first step is to move the plant to China, and the second step is to see if we can find the right automation equipment in China to replace it with humans, which is what we are doing now.

Second, there are many measurement needs.

The first one, such as the protective glass of iPhone or iPad, has processing errors and tolerances in length and width (15cm - 20cm), which need to be checked if it is within this range after processing.

The second one is that the iPhone has rounded corners, so we need to measure the rounded corners of the glass grinding of the phone cover, so that they can fit in.

Third, the iPhone's Home button needs to measure the diameter, as well as the distance between the round hole and the edge.

Fourth, the distance between the semi-finished parts of the mobile phone, such as the height of flatness, if you do not pay attention to the mobile phone local heating and other adverse consequences.

Fifth, glue, glue can not be too much too little, too much spillover will affect the process, not enough may affect the waterproof or strength.

The sixth, after the mobile phone installed, the mobile phone gap is in a reasonable range, the height of the two parts is in the same plane, if a high a low hand is not good, if the match is very good touch is very smooth.

All measurements are made to ensure water and dust resistance, safety and assemblability.

(2) the promotion of apple mobile phone to the visual detection industry

The iphone has contributed particularly to the testing industry.The previous quality control is, first, to buy testing equipment as long as almost enough to go, the accuracy is not the higher the better;Second, the purchase of testing equipment is generally used for many years, basically five years and ten years;Third, when designing the product process, it is necessary to consider whether there is detectability and improve the process if it is not good.The fourth is the use of sampling inspection, such as the factory a thousand I sampling inspection ten;Fourth, the product cycle is relatively long, such as the automotive industry product cycle is relatively long, at least three to five years or even ten years.

However, the mobile phone industry is different. The current quality control is: first, the budget, manpower and time are under great pressure, so the higher the equipment, the better;Second, the testing tool is basically a one-time expense. After the equipment has been bought for a year, the process has changed.Third, the design is driven by consumers, regardless of testing tools. Apple only designs what consumers need, and then finds the best resources in the world to solve the testing problem. It has a good way of giving orders.Fourth, because the shipment of apple is very large, if one in a thousand problem is also very large, so now must be a full inspection;Fifth, the whole industry, especially the mobile phone industry, six months a year new mobile phone, product life cycle is very short.Therefore, defect detection and measurement equipment are necessary.

3. Sorted out panel and screen detection companies

(1) Japanese company

FAST, Japan: founded in 1982, it's about 35 years old now.It has been in the LCD inspection business since 1998, working with companies such as sharp and setting up a subsidiary in Shanghai in 2004.

Japan's MJC company: started as a lamp-maker, and later also made AOI testing equipment. Later, because there was no industry in Japan, it did not make this equipment, but Taiwan's MJC is still making.

Yokogawa electric: mainly do LCD lighting detection, and later because of the LCD industry transfer did not do.

Keith: and some testing equipment.

(2) non-japanese company

Utech of Taiwan: it is a listed company in Taiwan, and it does well in panel detection of TV in Taiwan, but it is not very good for huaxing TV in mainland China.

Beijing lingyun: it is a machine vision company that also makes testing equipment. Its customers are mainly sharp and JDI. Since these two customers are not very good now, it is also a little weak.

Precision measurement electronics: from the lighting machine industry to the detection industry.

Shanghai fansheng: some people from philips and tianma came out to start their own business. At the beginning, they built the vehicle-mounted platform, and then they also entered the mobile phone industry.

Radiant: used to be a specialist in measuring instruments, but bought an algorithm from NASA that solved the mura detection problem in the industry.The company has now been acquired by Japan's Konica Minolta and has become a Japanese company.

4. The impact of OLED on the visual detection industry

Compared with LCD, OLED screen has three advantages: 1) low power consumption, energy saving and environmental protection, and longer standby time of mobile phone.2) self-illumination, without backlight module, can be made thinner and better handled;3) flexible, flexible and transparent, with more imagination space than the original mobile phone.Compared with LCD, the advantages of using OLED are extremely thin, extremely light and extremely soft.

These three advantages also pose new challenges for the industry, and there are many testing needs.

(1) extremely narrow problem: if the screen is made into a curved screen, the tolerance will be larger. The original tolerance of flat glass is 50 microns, but it will be about 200 microns when replaced with a curved screen.Curved glass needs hot bending, but each hot bending is not quite the same, assembly may appear slightly warped, waterproof is not easy to deal with, gap is very large.Apple has also dealt with flat glass in previous years, but bending glass is a more difficult process.Therefore, the first one needs to detect the curvature of the surface, the second one needs to detect the mobile phone case, and the third one needs both to complement each other. Apple phone is to choose the right screen and the right case for assembly, so the quality is good.

(2) extremely cold problem: the main problem is the battery. The battery is flexible and can change. To measure the shape and size of the battery requires a force to be measured, so it is very complicated.On the other hand, it is necessary to measure whether the size of the battery compartment is suitable or not.The third aspect is whether the bottom of the battery compartment is flat, which will have safety problems.

(3) extreme appearance: on the first hand, so far, the shear line of the cover glass has not been done well. When it becomes curved glass, it will be more difficult to detect the appearance defects.Second, the defects in the display screen, if there are defects in the plane can be fixed, in the bending of the defect point will be a new challenge.For the industry as a whole, many problems need to be solved after OLED replaces LCD, and many companies are working on them.

The amount of OLED detection equipment should be the same as the amount of LED detection equipment, but the amount should be at least doubled because it is more expensive.

5. Core technology of OLED vision detection and related companies at home and abroad

It could be some time before China's OLED industry starts producing OLED screens in large quantities, essentially after mid-2019.At present, I think Chinese companies are no worse than foreign countries in making equipment and solutions. Most of the equipment can be made in China, such as measuring equipment, etc., but the problem is that China lacks core components.The core components may include several aspects:

(1) basic algorithm: there are two excellent companies in the world, one is Cognex, a listed company in the United States, founded by a doctor from MIT in 1982; the other is MVTec in Germany, a technology company in Europe, founded by a teacher from the technical university of Munich.The two companies are providing the basic industrial algorithms.Domestic companies, in terms of basic algorithms, are shenzhen's chuangke, is planning to go public, since 2005, has been doing for 12 years, and Beijing lingyun.

(2) industrial camera: there are several foreign brands, including Basler, AVT, PointGray and Baumer, which are used in panel industry. 8K / 4K screen is large and the grid is small, so high pixel camera is required. This camera is very expensive.In terms of industrial cameras, haikang and dahua have officially entered this field since 2013.

(3) lens: OPTO and Mortex are available abroad.Lens domestic also has the company, has the shenzhen vision clear, can rui can also, the general project has no problem.

(4) laser measurement: 3D laser measurement is required for the rounded corners of OLED curved screens. The brands are keenz in Japan, Sick and Smartray in Germany, and Cognex in the United States. These companies are good at foreign laser focus ranging.Laser measurement, there is no domestic company.

(5) white light confocal: there are disadvantages to laser measurement. White light confocal is a new technology, and two companies, Still and Focalsepc, offer solutions.

(6) color detection: panel needs to detect off-color, such as Konica Minolta from Japan, Radiant from America, and Radiant from Japan. Now, Radiant is acquired by Konica Minolta.

Laser equipment and testing equipment experts

1. Talk about the OLED industry

At present, it seems that the output value of OLED reached 10 billion yuan in 2016, and it will increase by more than 10% by 2018. At present, samsung is the only company in the world. Basically, more than 90% of them are samsung's.

LG and samsung have division of labor, samsung focus on small screen, LG focus on large TV screen.Samsung and LG have different manufacturing processes. They both produce OLED screens, but in different ways.Samsung took the evaporation process line, is now the majority of the domestic small screen factory adopted the way, but the domestic is stuck here.Process is a ITO, etching, forming pixels fast, then evaporation encapsulation, then need to test, after testing requires more laser cutting, the last is the process of assembling ChengMo group, module stage need to install the chip, eventually driven by electricity, and finally a test, it is a whole process of the process.

Starting from the second half of this year in March, there is a relatively intensive investment in OLED production capacity:

On March 31, TCL's huaxing optoelectronics announced that it would invest in the T4 project in wuhan.

Tianma sixth generation line was lit up in wuhan on April 20.Lighting is an industry term. Lighting does not mean mass production, but that the whole process goes through. There is still a process to mass production.

On May 10, samsung OLED soft panel factory A4 officially started construction, also to speed up the investment in soft screen.

On May 11, BOE's first 6-generation line chengdu B6 was lit up.

On May 19, yungu (gu 'an) held the hoisting ceremony in kunshan. At present, weixinnuo has the best operation of 5.5 generation line in China, but the quantity is very small.

LG is also aggressively expanding its small and midsize screens, investing in a new plant in paju, South Korea.These investments are in the tens of billions of dollars, with the panel industry the largest outside the semiconductor industry.

In fact, the pressure in the industry is also very great, such as huawei, OPPO these domestic mobile phone manufacturers are now very anxious, it can not buy the screen.Now huawei has a strategic partnership with boe to launch the new screen regardless of yield and cost. Samsung's principle is to only supply apple and samsung, and limit domestic handset manufacturers like xiaomi and OPPO.

2. OLED industry chain

BOE and LG provide panels in the middle;Downstream is the end users of various industries, including television, mobile phone, iPad, car;Upstream includes a variety of equipment, material barrier film, driver chip, etc.Why China now for OLED industry, is an important equipment evaporation machine, is the pixel point by means of evaporation deposition to the substrate, is now dominated by Canon, and samsung package all the Canon three years of equipment capacity, so now many companies in China can't buy evaporation machine, directly restricts the OLED industry in China.

Here is a list of the major companies in the industry.Large group laser to laser processing, in fact, do not much detection;Zhiyun stock to do bonding machine, cleaning equipment;United with the wisdom of the cloud about;Zhaoqing guide, in fact, is the domestic dealer of ao bao, is the company founded by Chinese americans, due to the relatively dispersed stock rights, has not made a big move;There are tanaka seiji and shenkeda, shenkeda is also active layout of the panel industry;Yitian automation, which should not be listed, is a domestic automation company supported by huaxing photoelectric co., LTD., and will have relatively big development in the future.Zhengye science and technology, also went up board.

In terms of materials, there are strong new material, wanrun shares, puyang huicheng, kang DE new.Among them, kangdexin can pay attention to, which involves panel luminescence layer and ITO layer material, and the latter part is a relatively large market with a breakthrough.

The driver of IC is zhongying electronics.Opfy, which makes touch screens, is also expanding aggressively up and down the river, and is also assembling phones.

Several large panel companies include boe, shenzhen tianma, TCL (China star optoelectronics), and heiniu food (China display optoelectronics).

3. OLED equipment market

(1) laser equipment

We analyze the process mainly divided into front section, middle section and back section.In the middle part of the front section, there are some chemical equipment, such as evaporation and crystallization, which cannot be replaced in a short period of time in China. They are monopolized by Japan, South Korea and European and American countries.According to the whole market share division, the front equipment, that is, the equipment to make the large substrate before evaporation, accounts for 70% of the equipment, the equipment is very difficult, are doing semiconductor equipment manufacturers, our country is relatively weak semiconductor.The most core of the middle section is the evaporation machine, but the Japanese to give stuck, we can not do at home.In fact, what we can do is the last 15%, mainly automation, laser processing and testing.

(2) test equipment

In the LCD industry, only China and South Korea actually use visual detection. Japan is useless.In the LCD era, the Japanese moved the panel factory to China, all rely on the human inspection, because the human detection ability is very strong, the equipment always has something you can't see.The Japanese were very cautious and didn't have any testing equipment, but the Chinese tried and did better in this area.

Now entering the OLED stage, it is obvious that detection is more important.We divided the OLED process into three stages, first the substrate stage, then the evaporation process to form a color module, the RGB tri-color, by controlling the RGB luminescence color, and finally the module segment is to install the shell, into a screen.There are a lot of tests here. Array AOI is made by aobao to detect whether the glass substrate has defects, scratches and scratches. After that, light detection, namely Cell segment, has generated pixel points.Then the module segment is to do some chip testing.

According to the customer's requirements, two cutting devices need three detection devices. According to this estimate, if there is a market of 1 billion cutting devices, then there is a market of 1.5 billion detection devices.Now the yield rate of samsung has basically reached more than 70%, and may be even higher to 80-90%, while we are still less than 30-35%. The biggest benefit of adding testing equipment is that it can reduce the loss. The earlier the loss is found, the lower it is.It's the same thing with LCD in China. Ten years ago, the yield was in the low teens, but now it's 90%. So now we can compete with koreans and Japanese in the TV industry.OLED must also be this process, at this stage the yield is not enough, detection equipment is very important, every link must be added.At present, the opportunity for domestic enterprises should be after 2018, because the first wave of equipment procurement is unlikely to buy domestic equipment, all of which are imported.

Three, SMT industry experts

1. Brief introduction of electronic products industry

Electronic products can be divided into high value-added (automotive electronics, medical devices, industrial control) and mass manufacturing (mobile phones, laptops, civil products).Electronic industry transformation is fast, the trend is bigger, the industry chain is more complete.On-board electronics is a sub-field with strong stability and high technical content. At present, the volume of automotive electronics is not large, but it will have a good growth rate in the future.Especially now from traditional cars to new energy vehicles (pure electricity or hybrid), electric locomotive electronic demand will be higher, the car to intelligent development.

The changes of electronic products and manufacturing process can be seen from several aspects: 1.2. Electronic components;3. Wiring version;4. Assembling machine;5. Welding device;6. Solder.Representative products from the radio, the development of today's smart phones.SMT is an important reason for the miniaturization of mobile phones. Due to the continuous changes and progress in the SMT industry, although the peak has passed, there is still a lot of space and opportunities.

2. Sorting out SMT industry

(1) overview of SMT industry in China: the application of SMT in China started in the mid-1980s (1985). SMT production lines were initially introduced from the United States, Japan and other countries in a complete set for the production of color TV tuners.Subsequently, it is widely used in the production of pocket high grade multi-band radio, walkman, VCD, DVD, BB, mobile phone, etc. In recent years, it is also widely used in computer, communication equipment, medical equipment, automotive electronics, aerospace electronics.Global PCBA manufacturers, including those from the us, Japan, Europe, Singapore and Taiwan, have moved SMT processing plants to mainland China, making mainland China the global electronic manufacturing and processing center.

(2) the general development trend of SMT is as follows: components are smaller and smaller, assembly density is higher and higher, and assembly difficulty is higher and higher.In recent years, SMT has entered a new development climax.In order to further adapt to the development of electronic devices towards short, small, light and thin, CHIP 0210 (0.6mm * 0.3mm) appeared a few years ago.Current maximum mount speed: 100,000 CHIP (0402)/h, minimum mount: 01005 (0.01 x 0.005 in.).

(3) the SMT industry in China: from 1985 to 2015, a total of 123,535 SMT machines (customs statistics) have been introduced in the SMT industry in China in the past 30 years, with the value of one machine over RMB 1 million.In the first quarter of 2017, driven by the domestic smartphone market, the Chinese mainland imported 2,366 SMT machines worth us $350,440,300, up 38.1% and 32.9% respectively compared with the first three months of 2016, reaching the highest point in the same period since 2012.

Mounter is divided into high speed and medium speed, more than one line needs 10+ sets.Fuji and Siemens are the leader in the SMT machine industry, the former in mobile phones and advantages, the latter in the communications industry.Yamaha is a company with good operation in the mounter industry. It has acquired Hitachi's high-speed machine. It has a lot of LED lamp market.China's domestic brand is nearly 10 years began to appear, the mounter is 2-3 years before some users and market.

This year since the domestic market is particularly good, the possible reasons are: 1) investment cycle;2) mobile phone industry (apple's order quantity this year is still relatively large, and the development of domestic mobile phone brand is also very good);3) some EMS industries have emerged.At present the domestic mounter delivery cycle to 4-5 months, the oldest customer 3 months.

(4) related SMT equipment and brand

Fuji (1) placement machine: modular design, the production capacity with the aid of precise combination module to achieve optimal capacity), panasonic (high speed), ASM (Siemens), YAMAHA, JUKI, KS (samsung sold, level is low), MYCRONC, Europlacer, Taiwan yuan sheng, the road is the shenzhen, yangzhou, taizhou teng after the electromechanical, Beijing rui, comrade Beijing zhongke science and technology, shenzhen HuaZhiCheng (behind a few brands over the years, do the domestic line, some relatively simple things such as LED lights shop will use homebred), etc.;

2) printing machines: DEK (ASM), MPM, EKRA, GKG, dessen, etc.;

3) reflow: BTU, Vitronics soltec, Speedline, ERSA, REHM, HELLER, tamura, ETC., ridong, jintuo (300400), colonway, and west, ETC.;

4) AOI, SPI, X-ray (all are testing equipment) : OMRON, VI, koh-young, SAKI, shimazu, GE, Dage, rion, shenzhou vision, anda, zhenhuaxin, stech (839448), etc.

5) tin welding robot (later process, installation of peripheral components) : UNIX (world leader), Apollo, ATM, quick, etc. (first used in vehicle electronics, later 3C precision requirements also come up, from hand welding to robot).