Glass Substrate Robot: Display Fabs and ABB Arms

A flat screen starts life as a sheet of thin glass, and in a modern panel fab that sheet covers more floor than a parked car. Nobody can lift it safely, so a glass substrate robot carries it from tool to tool on forks with vacuum pads. This post follows display glass from the small plates of early liquid crystal displays, through suction lifters and the first clean transfer robots, to today's Gen 10.5 fabs and Samsung Display's new A7 factory. It ends with where ABB's cleanroom and heavy payload robots could fit.

Close up of the corner of an IPS LCD panel, with its pixel grid and wiring laid on glass. Photo: Jack Whittaker / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From calculator glass to suction cups and the first transfer robots

Liquid crystal displays started small. Sharp's EL-805 pocket calculator of 1973 used a liquid crystal display, and its circuit was built straight onto a glass board. When the industry began naming substrate generations, the first generation in 1990 measured about 200 to 300 mm by 200 to 400 mm, roughly the size of a large book. One person can carry a plate like that, much as workers in cleanroom suits carried silicon wafers by hand between machines in chip fabs.

Sharp's EL-805 pocket calculator of 1973, with its liquid crystal display. Photo: Joe Haupt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Building sites already had a tool for picking up glass without scratching it. Glaziers use vacuum lifters, frames with rubber suction cups, to hold a large pane by its flat face and set it into a window frame. The glass itself had a car industry past: Corning's LCD glass business grew out of a manufacturing process it first developed for automotive windshields, a venture that failed. Display makers took the suction idea indoors. The robots that later moved LCD glass use forks with several spaced prongs and a row of vacuum cups along each prong, so the sheet rests on many points across its face.

A vacuum lifter with suction cups holds a large glass pane while glaziers fit it to a building. Photo: Dimitri Hon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Yaskawa says it has supplied clean robots for handling LCD glass substrates since 1997, and by October 2007 it had shipped about 12,000 of them to flat panel lines. In November 2007 it launched the MOTOMAN-CDL3000D for 10th generation glass of 2,850 by 3,050 mm. Each of its two arms could carry 100 kg, the lift traveled 4,000 mm up and down, and a full handling cycle took 37.4 seconds. Robots also help with dirt: cleanrooms are designed around the fact that workers shed most of the particles, so every person taken off the floor helps.

Workers in cleanroom suits handle wafers by hand in a clean room, 2005. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Gen 10.5 mother glass and the new fabs being built in 2026

The largest glass in production is Gen 10.5, introduced in 2018 at 2,940 by 3,370 mm, which gives the most economical cuts for 65 and 75 inch TVs. Corning built the first factory for TFT grade Gen 10.5 glass right beside the BOE panel plant in Hefei, China, and began shipping production samples to BOE in late 2017, made from its EAGLE XG Slim glass. A sheet that size is far too large and fragile for people to carry, so it only ever moves on machines.

A BOE Technology building on Jinghai 1st Road, Beijing, 2023. Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

New fabs are still going up. On 18 September 2026 THE ELEC reported that Samsung Display has set the second week of July 2028 for moving equipment into its new A7 OLED factory in Asan, South Korea. A7 will have 746,284 square meters of floor space, Samsung C&T is the contractor, and construction will cost 650 billion won. Foundation work begins in November 2026, and talks with equipment suppliers start in 2027. On 30 September the same outlet reported that Shindo Eng. Lab, a display equipment maker founded in 1989, is taking its glass handling and vacuum bonding know-how into glass substrates for chip packaging.

Sharp's Kameyama LCD plant in Mie, Japan, 2016. Photo: Mj-bird / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The giant transfer robots inside Gen 10.5 fabs come from specialist suppliers, and no source shows ABB building one. ABB's cleanroom robots are smaller arms: the IRB 1300 and the IRB 1100 come in versions rated for ISO 4 cleanrooms. At the heavy end, an IRB 6700 lifts large solar modules for dhp technology, a flat, fragile, wide load much like a cut display panel. Our post on semiconductor clean room robots covers the chip side of the same story.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

Where display glass handling goes after Gen 10.5

Gen 10.5 is still the largest glass made. Korean industry press now reports OLED moving into laptops and monitors, and glass is moving into chip packaging, where companies like Shindo want to reuse what the display industry learned about holding thin glass flat. Those parts are smaller than TV glass, which suits a robot the size of an IRB 1300 in a clean cell. Cells like that are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, so reach, speed and clearance around fragile glass can be checked before anything is installed.

An industrial robot in a clean room at BBS Automation in Blaichach, Germany. Photo: Clemenspool / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Transport between tools and buildings is still open ground. An autonomous mobile robot such as the ABB Flexley Mover could in principle carry smaller glass or finished panels in back end areas, although no source shows that in a display plant today. Cost and cleanliness are the barriers, along with safety where people still walk the same aisles. ABB's SafeMove software, which sets safe speeds and zones around a robot, is one way to let people and robots share that space. A fab like A7 needs a 650 billion won building before a single tool arrives, so any robot inside has to be cleanroom rated and proven reliable.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a solar module for a folding roof at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

Home buyers never see any of this, but a cheaper, bigger TV or a thinner laptop screen depends on moving very thin glass without a scratch or a crack, and robots have done that work for almost thirty years. The skills are shifting as well. Panel lines and the new glass packaging plants need engineers who can program clean robots, tune vacuum grippers and simulate whole lines, skills that carry over from the applications in our guide to ABB robot use cases.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com