In recent years, the smartphone market has become increasingly saturated, falling into the incrementation bottleneck, and major manufacturers have been looking for opportunities to break the situation. Folding screen mobile phones have become the direction of many terminal brands for a while due to their form and expansion of use scenario. According to the data recently released by Counterpoint, a market research organization, the sales volume of China's folding screen smartphone market in the first quarter of 2022 was 670000, up by 391% year on year and 152% month on month. It is estimated that the shipment volume of China's folding screen smartphone market in 2022 will increase by 225% year on year, reaching 2.7 million units.
The rapidly developing market has catalyzed the maturing and evolution of many technologies in the field of folding screen. For example, the bending performance of OLED module directly determines the service life and user experience of a folding mobile phone. Therefore, it is widely concerned by consumers and has become a major issue for display module and terminal manufacturers to urgently improve and optimize.
As a leading enterprise in the global display industry, TCL CSOT's "Wedge Hinge Patent" is a new technological highland for the subject of bending performance of folding screen.
To further reduce the inner fold gap, in the hinge design process, it needs to make the best use of the inner space of the hinge, ensure the size of the stressed parts as far as possible, and design the cam asymmetrically to ensure the performance of the hinge while reducing the force on the cam and ensuring its life. In addition, the extremely small bending radius makes the screen too elastic in the process of bending, resulting in the need for greater torque to maintain the stability of the mechanism in the Free Stop stage. However, it is followed by the increase of the force on the torque mechanism, so the need to balance the increased torque and ensure the life of the torque mechanism is a major problem in the industry.
In view of the above problems, TCL CSOT carried out targeted technical breakthroughs. Through optimizing multi-body kinematics simulation, it designed the torque mechanism, rotating mechanism and connecting mechanism, combined with experiment and simulation, and improved them iteratively to ensure the torque demand of the hinge and ensure its service life. In addition, the principle of minimalist design is used to control the number of non-repetitive metal parts of the hinge within 11 types, which is simplified in terms of the number of parts compared with 13 kinds of accessories of the most advanced and mainstream hinge scheme currently.
In addition to simplifying the hinge structure, the patent also optimizes the appearance, which reduces the failure probability between parts, makes the hinge match the screen to achieve high reliability, and enhances the screen bending life (up to more than 200000 times) and anti-drop ability. At present, TCL CSOT wedge VIR1.2 technology has mass production capability, and customers can quickly conduct mass production and shipment after importing.
TCL CSOT has been deeply engaged in the field of folding for many years, committed to the in-depth exploration of flexible display application space, and has obtained many fruitful fruits in this field. In the field of folding screens, in addition to the conventional folding form, TCL CSOT has developed a series of new, reasonable and eye-catching flexible application forms, including extremely small folding wedge (U-shaped), extremely small folding water droplets, extremely small radius folding, 360º folding, multi folding display, etc. The world's first unpolarized 360° folding screen with minimal radius, which has repeatedly appeared in SID, ICDT exhibitions and other occasions, integrates the leading technology of infolding and outward-folding flexible screen technology and 360° Stress free self-compensating hinge. It has passed the life test of 200000 bends. At the same time, the product has a built-in active pen, which can easily deal with business application scenarios such as handwriting and drawing. It will also inject new power into the rise of folding screen terminals.
The world's first unpolarized 360° folding screen with minimal radius
In the future, TCL CSOT will also be committed to the exploration of forward-looking display trends, and keep improving on the trends, injecting new impetus into the development of the industry through excellent products and integrated solutions!
