Ilitek visit

jon at rejon.org jon at rejon.org
Sat Jul 17 03:17:54 EDT 2010


This is so cool. Can you put this on the wiki? We have a nice list of
these companies growing!

Also, question about the DSC. Just conjecture, and I know very little
about DSC, but what would it take to get a small little DSC optics to
fit into something like the Ben? Something like the 8963. Also, how
possible to drive something like this to freedom?

Curious for a few reasons. Apologies for misused terms.

Jon

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Wolfgang Spraul <wolfgang at sharism.cc> wrote:
> Hi,
> went to visit the makers of the drive IC used in Ben NanoNote yesterday,
> Ilitek. My notes...
>
> -- company
>
> *) Ilitek was founded in 2004, headquarters are in Xinzhu/Taiwan, sales and
>   FAE offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen.
> *) They have about 230 people in Xinzhu, 13 in Shenzhen, 6 in Shanghai, etc.
> *) mostly make drive ICs right now, have started development of capacitive
>   touch controllers (already taped out, roadshow next week)
> *) their foundry partners are TSMC (6k 8inch wafers/month), SilTerra (10k 8inch
>   wafers/month) and PSC (10k 8inch wafers/month, plan to go to 10k 12inch
>   wafers/month in 2010)
> *) they started with 500nm process in 2004, latest chips in 2010 use 110nm process
>
> -- mobile phones
>
> *) company first started with drive ICs for mobile phones, which is their
>   main market right now
> *) 70% market share in mainland china, in q1/2010 sold about 100kk mobile
>   phone drive ICs (240kk in all of 2009)
> *) price of one mobile phone drive IC 40-50 US cents, extremely price
>   sensitive even to .5 cent increments
> *) drive ICs from 128x160 pixels (qqvga), to 176x220 (qcif+) and up
> *) mobile phone drive ICs start with 9 (9225, 9331, 9340, ...)
>
> -- DSC (digital still cameras)
>
> *) DSC uses 'delta arrangement' (as opposed to 'stripe arrangement') to make
>   photos look better
> *) DSC division only about 10 people, selling about 2kk drive ICs/month now
> (hey: that's our 200 units/month Ben NanoNote in there!!!)
> *) DSC drive ICs start with 8 (8960, 8961, 8963)
> *) first DSC IC was for Casio (ILI8480), ILI8960 was first standardized DSC drive IC
> *) newer 8960C supports better viewing angle
> *) 8961 is cost-down version (16800x732 micron for 8960, 14470x670 micron for 8961)
> *) 8963 next year will support 320x480 pixels, probably for Japanese market first
> *) main customers are CPT, HSD, CMI (Chimei and Innolux merged into CMI)
> *) Innolux tries to control the market and sells very selectively, others
>   sell to the open market
>
> -- notebooks
>
> *) sells about 1-2kk notebook drive ICs per month
> *) numbers start with 6 (6121, 6122, 6125, 6150)
>
> ------
> Bottom line for us: We learnt that the professional term for the
> 'checkerboard' pixel arrangement in the Ben NanoNote is 'delta
> arrangement' as opposed to the 'stripe arrangement' found in most
> other LCMs. Also we have a good contact now at Ilitek to help us
> with datasheets, or to quickly find other LCM modules with Ilitek
> drive ICs, if we want to achieve continuity for our free drivers.
>
> Nothing special, but nice to have a contact there...
> Wolfgang
>
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-- 
Jon Phillips
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