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Tuesday August 25, 2009
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Giant LCDs require giant robots. On a tour of Samsung's LCD factory in Cheonan, Korea yesterday, I got to see how cutting-edge TVs are put together - and it was the closest to Cyberdyne Systems I've ever encountered.
According to our Samsung guide, LCD TVs have four basic parts: there's a layer of liquid crystals sandwiched between two sheets of glass, all placed in front of a backlight unit. The back sheet of glass has colored pixels embedded in it; the front sheet has transistors that alter the liquid crystals' state to hide or reveal the filtered light.
At Samsung's factory in Cheonan, it takes about ten days to make an LCD TV. I got to see the last part of the process, which takes four hours: assembly. Down a nearly endless, white hallway I peered into several large windows to find giant robots - and the occasional white-garbed Samsung quality control worker - hauling and assembling 46" screens.
Billions of dollars worth of robots, which look like jukeboxes with internal arms, pick up the sheets of glass, clean them, and assemble them. They pop partially-assembled LCDs onto robotic bumper cars called LGVs (Laser-Guided Vehicles) which pass them to another robot jukebox. If the LGVs get too close to a human worker, they start playing "London Bridge is Falling Down." The human workers, meanwhile, are puttering around to check quality - making sure the robots are doing their job and not, say, plotting to destroy us.
Once the LCD screen gets assembled with its backlight, it's sent up (on a robot elevator, of course) to a heat-testing room where it's baked at 45 degrees Celsius for two hours, and then scanned (by a robot eye, of course) to make sure it still works.
Then the real human work kicks in. An assembly line of women - all women, for some reason - test every single panel, eyeballing the corners, feeling the connections, and literally pounding on large spots marked on the panel to make sure the liquid crystals respond correctly. If two workers say a panel is OK, it goes to a TV manufacturer to be incorporated into a TV; if one of the two doesn't like the panel (which happens about 2% of the time), it gets used for in-house applications like digital signage around the Samsung offices.
Samsung's LCD factories in Cheonan are colossal, and expanding. They showed me a huge swathe of land where they're planning to put down two new assembly lines for "generation 11" LCDs, optimized to produce panels up to 70". OLED may be starting to come up as a display technology, but LCD will rule the world for some years to come, Samsung reps said.
Want more? Check out Michael Miller's visit to an LG LCD factory on his blog, Forward Thinking.
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August 26, 2009 2:58 PM
This is pretty cool! Thanks for the report.