Sharp Corporation held the groundbreaking ceremony for its plant in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan that it calls a "Manufacturing Complex for the 21st Century."
Sharp is aiming to make this a major industrial zone: in addition to the horizontal deployment of its proprietary thin-film technology to cutting-edge LCD panel and solar cell plants, Sharp is inviting relevant infrastructure and material and equipment manufacturers to construct their plants on the site.
This will push the vertically integrated business model created at the Kameyama Plant further upstream in the supply chain and achieve a vertically integrated model that transcends company borders. It will also allow Sharp engineers to work closely with their counterparts in leading material and equipment manufacturers, thus giving rise to new technical innovations through shared knowledge and expertise.
The LCD panel plant is scheduled to start operation by March 2010 and it will be the first facility to use tenth-generation glass substrates (2,850 x 3,050 mm), the world's largest.
The solar cell plant is also set to start production by March 2010. Plans call for an annual production volume of 1,000 MW (one million kW) a year for thin-film solar cells. -Sharp
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