APPLICATION OF TOLERANCE METHOD TO THE TFT-LCD DESIGN

In the past few years, the TFT-LCD industry has become the driving force of the whole photonics market of Taiwan. As manufacturers establish new generations of TFT-LCD product lines, the key competitive advantages of this industry have shifted from mass-production to a low cost, diverse product and application mix and technological leadership. The objective of this research is to directly applied tolerance methods in product design and attempted to derive the appropriate material specification window to reduce costs. First, the propagation of error method was applied to compare two study cases and to find the critical items. Second, the Monte Carlo simulation was used to replace the target materials and the process capability was calculated to verify whether the resulting quality level met the design goals. Finally, the Taguchi method was used to double check the new design quality, and material costs were successfully reduced. This paper examines various tolerance design methods to reduce material costs. The methodology can not only be applied to new projects, but also be used to solve some of the design revision problems faced in smaller projects, so that the products can immediately achieve better performance. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]