It has been nearly 10 years since the birth of in-cell touch control, and it has basically completed its absolute domination of the mobile phone market. According to Omdia, in-cell touch controls (including LCD in-cell, LCD on-cell and AMOLED on-cell) will account for more than 90% of mobile applications in 2021, with Apple's GF2 structure accounting for more than three-quarters of the rest. In other words, non-Apple plug-in touches already make up less than 2% of smartphones.

The development of embedded touch control is the best way for panel manufacturers to take part in touch control field and increase the added value. After dominating the smartphone market, panel makers' next steps in touch focus on expanding in-cell touch controls to larger applications and developing stable and reliable foldable touch controls. In the early stage of the birth of foldable mobile phones, for the consideration of yield and stability of the process, some panel manufacturers and brands used to adopt plug-in foldable touch with foldable panel. However, after nearly two years of development, almost all newly launched foldable AMOLED products now use on-cell touch structure, and it only took a short time for panel manufacturers to once again claim to dominate the foldable touch market. As a special form of flexible display, the device structure and characteristics of foldable display are basically the same as those of flexible AMOLED, which adopt TFE to encapsulate organic light-emitting materials. Due to the thin laminated structure, the load is larger than that of rigid AMOLED, and the noise coupling is also large, which makes it difficult for the touch control with high alarm point rate (240Hz). In addition, after the foldable product is expanded, the size is equivalent to a conventional tablet, so it becomes necessary to consider the application scenario of active pen, and the communication protocol of active pen will add some challenges. For these challenges and difficulties, touch IC factories are actively developing different designs at different prices to correspond, and panel factories should pay more attention to design selection and cost control.

As for expanding in-cell touch to larger applications, Omdia observes that in-cell touch is rapidly gaining ground in the tablet market, with in-Cell expected to ship more than 60 million panels this year, accounting for more than 40% of the total. Notebook will be in a similar situation, only later than originally expected. Originally, 2021 was expected to be the first year for notebook in-cell touch, but due to the hot NB market in the past few quarters and the shortage of IC resources, brands focused more on shipping and catching up existing products. At present, with the easing of the terminal market demand and the active layout and promotion of LTPS in-cell products by panel manufacturers, it is expected that the embedded touch will accelerate to occupy the pen market at the end of this year or early next year.

Vehicle as another market focus, screen manufacturers are actively concerned about the application point. Although the proportion of in-cell touch control is still low at present, with the development of in-cell design concept, the needs and advantages of in-cell touch control (represented by in-cell) are being amplified. In fact, the proportion of in-cell in the design of the updated model or the new in-car central control screen has been significantly increased. This is inseparable from the trend of vehicle central control screen, large screen, curved, multi-screen, and then from multi-screen evolution to integration of strip large screen .

Folding screen as the core device for brands to seize the ultra-high order market this year, its development process is concerned by the industry. At present, hinge and foldable coverlens are two important bottleneck components. CPI and UTG have always been the mainstream foldable cover materials. CPI was first used in foldable mobile phones. As a polymer material, its foldable performance is beyond doubt, but its plasticity, hardness and surface flatness are slightly inadequate. Then, starting with Galaxy Z Filp, Samsung firmly introduced UTG (ultra-thin glass) into the foldable screen as the main material for the foldable cover, supplemented by PET. Up to now, UTG cover is not perfect, many inherent problems (such as creases) are still not completely solved, of course, the improvement is there for all to see. It's still not clear which CPI or UTG will be the winner, but Samsung's insistence has tipped the balance toward UTG, with brands leaning toward foldable displays with UTG. It is understood that all brands (with the exception of Huawei and Honor) will release their foldable products with UTG in the next six to 12 months. The supply chain is also actively preparing for the war. Previously, DSHshshort was the only UTG supplier.Now Corning is entering the Foldable market with FTG (Foldable Thin Glass), which is poised to become the second supplier to Samsung Electronics. In China, although there is no UTG manufacturer for direct mass production, a number of cover processing plants are also actively developing UTG in thin mode, and some have entered the small-batch stage.

The panel factory provides the foldable panel, whether with CPI or UTG, the panel factory is almost always responsible for the coverlens and screen fitting, as well as the final reliability verification. It is not difficult to see that the panel factory is not only a spectator role for the foldable cover plate, but more involved and even put forward specification requirements, which is completely different from the role division of labor between the traditional glass coverlens and the panel factory. In general, we can see that the panel factory is taking on more and more responsibilities. The convergence of various functions (such as touch panel and coverlenss ) makes the panel factory more and more like a system factory. The future development direction of the panel factory will be to provide platforming service.