In the vast river of China’s display industry, Tianma has always played an important pioneering role. Author: Xu Yi Editor: Zi QiOn April 10, the OPPO Find X8s is set to make its global debut, featuring a 1.25mm world’s narrowest four-sided OLED screen that has become the focus of attention.1.25mm and four-sided mean that the entire screen is nearly visually symmetrical, with a bezel as narrow as a guitar string. This “Chinese screen” supplied by Tianma Microelectronics not only refreshes the record for the narrowest bezel in mass production models globally but also brings a leap in visual experience, as well as another advancement in industrial design and manufacturing capabilities.In early April, “Yi Observation” visited Tianma’s sixth-generation flexible AMOLED production line (Xiamen TM18 factory) to closely understand the research and production processes behind the world’s narrowest four-sided screen, experiencing firsthand how “Tianma Intelligent Manufacturing” empowers new benchmarks in consumer electronics through technological innovation, customized collaboration, high-precision equipment, and automated management.Through a screen with an extremely narrow bezel, we can see that the evolution of domestic screen technology is shifting from “parameter stacking” to a systematic definition of “user experience” and “industrial aesthetic value”.If we continue to elevate our perspective and look back at Tianma’s more than 40 years of focus on the development of the display industry, we can see how Chinese display companies have gradually moved from introduction, imitation, and following to achieving breakthroughs in independent innovation, actively reconstructing the global display ecosystem’s value coordinate system.
’How to Win a “Micron-Level” Tough Battle?Narrowing the screen bezel to 1.25mm may seem like a simple “subtraction”, but it is actually a “micron-level” manufacturing challenge driven by user experience.From a product perspective, the 1.25mm ultra-narrow bezel is not merely a physical parameter breakthrough, but a deep-rooted evolution of value based on user experience.For users, a higher screen-to-body ratio can provide a greater visual impact, allowing the gaze to naturally focus on the screen content itself, resulting in a “visible experience upgrade”; on the other hand, the screen’s “black border” is inherently a compromise in manufacturing processes and design language, and the extreme narrowing of the bezel essentially prioritizes an even more refined “user experience”, driven by product value evolution.From a technical perspective, achieving the 1.25mm four-sided design is far from a simple reduction of a process number; it is the result of deep collaboration among materials engineering, drive architecture, packaging technology, and industrial design.The ultra-narrow bezel design requires the layout of drive chips, circuit wiring, and display panels to achieve extreme precision, with every millimeter of optimization being highly challenging. Previous products on the market could achieve ultra-narrow bezels, but often faced limitations due to manufacturing precision, cost, and yield, making it difficult to avoid asymmetry in the upper/lower or left/right bezels.However, as one of the largest single-unit and most advanced sixth-generation flexible AMOLED factories in China, Tianma’s Xiamen TM18 factory combines high-precision manufacturing equipment, fully automated production lines, and a rigorous quality inspection system to collectively win this “micron-level” battle.To minimize the bezel width, Tianma employs industry-leading ultra-narrow bezel technology to achieve extreme narrowness. In addition to the narrow bezels, Tianma has also achieved physical breakthroughs such as equal height on all four sides and corners, while ensuring the screen’s drop resistance, achieving a 400% improvement in anti-compression performance.While investing in top-tier high-precision equipment for production, Tianma’s extremely rigorous full lifecycle quality management system also ensures the zero-defect delivery of this “good screen”.At Tianma’s Xiamen TM18 factory, a screen undergoes 482 inspection stations, over 1137 quality control nodes, and the testing phase includes extreme temperature cycling, ultra-deep microscopic inspections, steel ball drop tests from extreme heights, and 115 extreme validations such as hundreds of thousands of bending tests, making the production and quality inspection process particularly meticulous and strict. Additionally, Tianma opens core production line data to strategic brand customers, allowing them to track exclusive production line yield fluctuations in real-time, achieving “transparent quality inspection” and ensuring the reliability of every screen from production line to delivery.After the on-site visit, “Yi Observation” clearly sensed that Tianma’s victory in this “micron-level” battle was almost inevitable.As a pioneer in China’s display industry and one of the oldest existing display companies in the country, Tianma has been deeply involved in the display field for 42 years. During this time, the Chinese technology industry has undergone significant changes, with many opportunities arising, yet Tianma has consistently focused on the small to medium-sized display sector, maintaining a “one-meter-wide” track while digging deep into “one-thousand-meter-deep” value.With strong strategic determination, Tianma insists on solidly laying the technical foundation, deploying a full matrix technology layout in the display field. By 2024, Tianma will continue to invest 9.99% of its operating income into R&D. As of 2024, Tianma has applied for nearly 20,000 patents, with over 12,000 patents granted, firmly establishing a solid technical moat.Based on this, on the current 1.25mm world’s narrowest four-sided screen, Tianma has innovatively developed FIAA panel technology (where signal routing is hidden within the display area), reducing the physical limits of the screen’s boundaries even further, and under millimeter-level bonding processes, retaining the sealing edge and compressing it to0.3 mm, ultimately collaborating with OPPO to achieve the 1.25mm world’s narrowest screen bezel, giving the screen an “edge-less” immersive visual experience. Not only has Tianma achieved breakthroughs in ultra-narrow bezels, but it is also pursuing comprehensive innovations for a good screen, establishing the SLOD stacked drive technology that eliminates battery anxiety and extends lifespan by 300%, and the CFOT integrated technology that allows for thinner, brighter, and more energy-efficient displays, which can be seen as the culmination of Tianma’s past technological accumulation.Continuously honing technology, intelligent manufacturing production throughout the process, and strict quality inspection standards are the interconnected industrial loops formed by years of deep cultivation, ensuring that Tianma can produce a small screen to mass production levels of excellence, becoming the definers of the new generation of “good screens”.
’User, Industry, Market: A Comprehensive Value InnovationStarting from this world’s narrowest four-sided screen, we can see that Tianma, as a representative enterprise of China’s display industry transitioning from “follower” to “definer”, is leveraging technological limits to drive comprehensive value innovation across users, industries, and markets.First is the advancement of user experience based on deep scene insights.After years of development, Tianma has formed a product matrix covering multiple fields such as mobile phones, automotive, IT, industrial, medical, and AIOT. This diversified scene coverage capability allows it to build a scene-centric “display ecosystem” barrier, such as instrument displays, central control screens, electronic rearview mirrors, armrest screens, and ceiling screens in automotive scenarios. On the other hand, it has also honed Tianma’s scene insight capabilities from multiple dimensions, giving it a significant advantage in refining user experience.The most intuitive example is that while pursuing the breakthrough of the 1.25mm ultra-narrow four-sided design, Tianma also considers users’ other needs for the screen, such as picture quality, eye protection, and energy consumption, meeting users’ comprehensive pursuit of display quality.The display effect is at the core of user experience, and Tianma pushes brightness, color, and other core visual effects to new heights through its self-developed SLOD stacked devices. For example, a global brightness of 3200 nits enhances visibility under strong light by three times, while 1 nit of precise dimming provides a soft and non-dazzling experience in low-light environments. At the same time, with 100% DCI-P3 “cinema-level” color gamut coverage, the screen can accurately reproduce the color of every frame, allowing users to enjoy a true and transparent visual effect in any scenario.In addition to picture quality, eye protection is also one of Tianma’s core considerations. Through the collaborative effects of hardware-level low blue light solutions, 4320Hz ultra-high frequency PWM dimming technology, and innovative full-brightness DC dimming modes, Tianma has reduced the harmful blue light ratio to 4.7% and eliminated the flickering issues associated with traditional low-frequency dimming, achieving flicker control effects certified by Germany’s TÜV, effectively preventing eye fatigue caused by prolonged screen use and alleviating visual discomfort.
In terms of battery life, Tianma’s LTPO low-frequency drive technology supports adaptive refresh rates from 1-165Hz, flexibly reducing power consumption during daily use; the introduction of new pixel drive ADP technology, the latest EL material system U9, and self-developed SLOD technology allows users to say goodbye to battery anxiety while also providing a new direction for the sustainable development of display technology.In Tianma’s view, the standards for a “good screen” can have multiple dimensions. In addition to past evaluation dimensions such as resolution and refresh rate, visual experience, transparent picture quality, health eye protection, low consumption, and long battery life are also becoming more important indicators of “user-perceptible factors”. Tianma is leveraging these multidimensional leading advantages to guide the industry from “parameter surpassing” to a new stage of “experience definition”.Secondly, the industrial breakthrough value of collaborating with upstream and downstream to migrate to higher technical standards.The advancement of display technology depends not only on the technological breakthroughs of individual enterprises but also on the cooperation and optimization of the entire industry chain.The launch of the 1.25mm world’s narrowest four-sided screen has driven the entire industry chain to migrate to higher technical standards, which is attributed to the joint R&D between Tianma and OPPO, combining OPPO’s next-generation chip-level screen packaging technology with Tianma’s ultra-narrow bezel process innovations, and is also inseparable from Tianma’s more than 40 years of accumulated efficient production manufacturing and industry chain collaboration capabilities.At Tianma’s Xiamen TM18 factory, the world’s top evaporation machines, exposure machines, and other equipment operate in an orderly manner, fully supporting semiconductor-level high-precision process technology, ensuring the high-quality production of the 1.25mm world’s narrowest four-sided screen, and supporting Tianma’s flexible production across multiple product lines. Additionally, relying on an intelligent manufacturing platform that integrates green manufacturing concepts and operating in a surgical room-level environment, Tianma has achieved precise control over every production link, effectively ensuring precision manufacturing efficiency and quality, setting higher production standards for the entire display industry.At the same time, Tianma continues to strengthen the connections within the industry chain: establishing the Hubei Yangtze New Display Industry Innovation Center, which has a complete process R&D technology platform equipped with the world’s highest precision R&D equipment, focusing on OLED technology R&D through independent R&D experimental line platforms, and expanding compatibility and equipment optimization for long-term technologies such as Micro-LED and sensing technology, while also establishing the Tianma New Display Technology Research Institute, initiating the industry’s first Micro-LED ecological alliance to accelerate the industrialization of Micro-LED display technology, thus promoting ecological collaboration in technology, equipment, materials, and other aspects within the industry chain.Based on its independent layout and multi-party collaboration in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain, Tianma has not only repeatedly collaborated with supply chain partners to overcome industrial technology bottlenecks but has also actively participated in the formulation of industry standards, such as leading the formulation of the “Automotive Cockpit LCD Display Module” group standard and two industry standards for Micro-LED automotive displays, continuously playing an important role in promoting industry standardization.
Furthermore, differentiated technological innovation has also brought more intuitive market value gains.In today’s smartphone industrial design, which tends to be homogenized, the extreme narrowing of bezels has become one of the main ways to enhance the front appearance. On the OPPO Find X8s, the 1.25mm world’s narrowest four-sided screen is an important part of the overall appearance recognition, providing unique value enhancement for the product and becoming a key element in conveying brand philosophy and technological strength.Previously, Tianma had already established collaborations with several leading smartphone, automotive, and IT manufacturers, leveraging its technological advantages, large-scale customization capabilities, and stable delivery capabilities to provide industry-leading, customized flagship display products. Among them, Tianma has repeatedly received the “Excellent Quality Award” and “Outstanding Quality Award” from OPPO, as well as the SID 2024 “Best OLED Technology Award” and other international honors. These direct recognitions from customers and the industry strongly endorse Tianma’s technological capabilities, quality stability, and market value.From “hardware parameter competition” to “user experience enhancement”, from “single-point technology breakthroughs” to “industrial collaborative breakthroughs”, from “standard product supply” to “customized value creation”, to some extent, Tianma is no longer limited to traditional development paths but is reconstructing the value coordinate system of the display ecosystem with more forward-looking, systematic, and sustainable thinking, leading Chinese display companies from “followers” to “definers”, reshaping the future of the global display industry.’Yi Observation CommentaryIn the vast river of China’s display industry, Tianma has always played an important pioneering role.From TN, STN passive displays to a-Si, LTPS, Oxide LCD, and then to AMOLED, Micro-LED, Tianma’s development has intertwined and achieved the rise of China’s display industry over the past 40 years, traversing every “peak” of industrial accumulation and crossing the technological chasms of various cycles.Third-party data shows that by 2024, Tianma’s flexible AMOLED mobile phone main screen shipment market share has reached third globally and second domestically; in the automotive sector, Tianma ranks first globally in automotive display shipments, automotive instrument displays, and automotive HUD displays, with one in every four cars globally using Tianma’s instrument display products. Additionally, in specialized display segments such as medical, maritime, and industrial handheld displays, Tianma also occupies a leading position.In Tianma, we can see a triple leap from “catching up” to “leading”, from “following” to “defining”, from “manufacturing” to “intelligent manufacturing”, which is a microcosm of how Chinese display companies are gradually moving towards global technological heights.Now, under the guidance of the “2+1+N” strategy, Tianma continues to expand the boundaries of display technology through technological innovation, scene-based customization, and global ecological collaboration, actively deepening the integration of AI and display technology, exploring cross-border applications in automotive, wearable, XR, and other scenarios, leading the industry towards a higher-dimensional ecological competition.The realization of the “world’s narrowest four-sided screen” is clearly not just a limit breakthrough of a screen, but a crucial breakthrough for Tianma, signaling that Chinese display companies are gaining technological initiative and independently writing a new narrative for the global screen industry.
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Founder of “Yi Observation” Xu Yi
Former Chief Editor of Sohu Technology Communications
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