Date Visited: October 8, 1991

Report Author: R.D. Shelton

ATTENDEES

JTEC:

Glenn
Firester
Thompson
Shelton

HOST:

Masamichi Wada

Takao Sakamoto

Takuhiro Onoda

NARRATIVE OF ACTIVITIES

Mr. Sakamoto took us to the Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) offices in Otsu by car. Most of the visit consisted of discussions in a conference room. A company video showed NEG's glass manufacturing methods and applications of many of their products. Since the discussion ended 30 minutes earlier than scheduled, Mr. Wada provided an impromptu tour of the physical testing lab.

COMPANY PROFILE

NEG is affiliated with NEC, which owns 40% of its stock. Its sales were 203.1 billion yen in FY 1990, up slightly from 194.6 billion yen the previous year. In addition to some glass- building materials, it makes a wide range of glass-related products for the electric and electronic industries: fluorescent light tubes, lenses for LEDs, windows for EPROMs, ceramic IC packages, bulbs for CRT displays, precision sheet glass for LCD displays, and many others. Of its 4,610 employees, only about 70 are engaged in corporate research and development--NEG has no central research facility. They have plants in Fujisawa, Shiga-Takasuki, Notogawa, and the one we visited in Otsu, near Nara.

SIGNIFICANT FINDINGS

The discussion centered on glass products for displays. In 1984, NEG pioneered large CRT bottles at the request of Sony. They presently are the world leader in large CRT bottles, and they make the largest--a 45-inch diagonal giant we saw in their display at the Japan Electronics Show. Mr. Wada believes that the CRT business will continue to be profitable for them because of the advent of HDTV.

However, the main product of interest to this panel was NEG's OA-2 alkali-free sheet glass intended for the substrate of active matrix LCDs. Corning's 7059 glass, which is being used by most of the display manufacturers the panel visited, has about 90% of this market. NEG is attempting to increase its market share by specifying OA-2 with a slightly higher strain-point temperature: 635 degrees centigrade, compared to 590 degrees centigrade for 7059. They also claim that OA-2 has somewhat fewer defects than the Corning glass. Mr. Wada said that Corning has recently raised its prices, and that should help NEG. He also said that NEG had sufficient manufacturing capacity to supply a much greater market share.

REFERENCES

1. "Nippon Electric Glass: 1990-91." (English) NEG 1991. Company brochure primarily listing product lines.
2. "Special Report on Thin Sheet Glass for Electronics". P&P 16 Company Technical Journal. (English and Japanese). NEG 1987. Contains good discussion on role of glass in LCD applications.
3. Masamichi Wada, "New Glass Products by New Forming Technologies," (English). NEG internal publication. Engineering details of redrawing--reheating and redrawing of preform mother glass to reduce viscosity and improve dimensional precision. NEG was the first to use redrawing to make sheet glass as large as 300mm x 350mm x 0.7mm for LCD panels. The redrawing technique is used for OA-2 and other much thinner sheet glass. The temperature parameters for OA-2 given in this paper are slightly lower than the ones on the specification sheet.
4. "Electronic Glass Materials: Thin Sheet Glasses and Micro Rods," Second Edition (English) NEG 1991. Specification sheets for glass products for several display and sensor applications.