For years, the smartphone and television industries have been engaged in a relentless pursuit of a single, elusive goal: the perfect, all-screen front. We've witnessed borders shrink to slivers, seen screens curve at the edges, and marveled at hole-punch cameras—all in the name of maximizing our viewable real estate. But a physical bezel, however tiny, has always remained. Until now.
A breakthrough in laser technology, showcased at a recent industry conference in Germany, promises to finally make the dream of a truly borderless display a manufacturable reality. The key? A shift from conventional lasers to powerful and precise deep-UV lasers.
The Host with a Vision: Coherent's Laser Roadmap
The glimpse into this bezel-free future came from Coherent, a leading provider of laser solutions, during their hosting of the Mid-Europe Chapter Conference of the Society of Information Display (SID-MEC Conference). Based in Göttingen, Germany, the company is a pivotal player in display manufacturing, not only providing tools for laser annealing—a crucial early stage in production—but also for the precise cutting of individual displays from larger panels.
The fundamental challenge has always been the cut itself. While manufacturers have made bezels incredibly thin, often by folding the display edges to create the illusion of a borderless screen, the underlying material still fractures at the edge. This rough, micro-scaled edge is then hidden and protected by a physical bezel, which prevents the delicate layers of the display from starting to delaminate over time.
Why Your "Borderless" Phone Still Has a Border
To understand the breakthrough, one needs to see the problem. Coherent presented a clear visual comparison. When a standard UV laser with a wavelength of 355 nanometers (nm) is used to cut the display glass, the side profile reveals a jagged, uneven mess. The various laminate layers are not cleanly separated, necessitating a frame to hide the imperfection. Moving to a slightly more refined 345 nm laser improves the result, but it's still far from the pristine edge required for a genuine bezel-free design.
The quantum leap comes with the third option: the deep-UV laser operating at a wavelength of 266 nm. The side-view image of this cut is dramatically different. It's so clean and precise that the layers at the edge show barely any damage. This level of precision means the material loss at the boundary is less than the width of a single pixel.
"According to Coherent, there is typically a gap of 50 to 60 micrometers between pixels on modern displays," an industry insider noted at the event. "This non-active area is the perfect channel for the deep-UV laser to make its cut, effectively eliminating the need for a bezel to hide the process."
This precision is part of a larger evolution in display manufacturing. As the company explores in a detailed blog post on their broader role in the industry, advancements in laser annealing for flat panel displays are setting the stage for these subsequent, more refined cutting processes, creating a more integrated and efficient production pipeline.
The Road to Mass Production: Powering Up the Future
While the promise of a flawless, borderless display is tantalizing, there is one significant hurdle remaining: speed. The current generation of deep-UV lasers capable of this precision operates at around 10W of power. At this level, the cutting process is too slow to be viable for the high-volume demands of global smartphone and TV manufacturing; it would simply make the end products prohibitively expensive.
The true gateway to our bezel-free future, therefore, lies in the next power upgrade. Coherent anticipates that with the development of 20W deep-UV lasers, the cutting speed will increase sufficiently to enable cost-effective mass production. This higher power would allow manufacturers to achieve the same pristine cut at a pace that meets market demands.
Coherent has not yet provided a specific timeline for when these more powerful lasers will be ready for shipment. Once they are, the equipment will make its way from their Göttingen facilities to display panel manufacturers across Asia to be integrated into their production lines.
The implication is clear: the technology for a truly borderless display now exists in practice. The final step is scaling its power. When that happens, the bezel, a mainstay of consumer electronics for decades, will finally fade into obsolescence, unlocking a new era of seamless, all-screen devices.
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