119: Screens are really hard

On the way back, Zheng Jiang kept considering Chen Chen's proposal.

It wasn't just phones; for any device powered by electricity, the bottleneck for battery life was always the battery itself.

[Note: If you're reading this, please remember our domain, Taiwan Novel Website, for all your book needs—twkan.com is super practical!]

He had already calculated the battery life of the DJI Phantom using Yangtze River Battery. The endurance would increase by about 30%, reaching a maximum of over 22 minutes. Moreover, the discharge rate of the Yangtze River Battery was higher, reaching a terrifying 35C, which could provide drones with stronger power and longer cruise times.

The longer a flying camera stays in the air, the more likely a user is to capture satisfying photos and videos!

Furthermore, that folding drone particularly attracted Zheng Jiang. Weren't consumer drones currently failing to open up the market because their size made them insufficiently portable? Yangtze River Battery's smaller size left more design space for other equipment in the fuselage.

Creating a small drone with foldable arms that a user could even put in their pocket would greatly promote the maturity of the entire market.

The more Zheng Jiang thought about it, the more excited he became. He immediately flew to Shenzhen to discuss joining the Red Star ecosystem with the other founders.

From last year to now, Red Star had invested in dozens of companies. Among them, the larger amounts went to DJI, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance.

DJI goes without saying; there are only two brands of drones on the market: DJI and others. Chen Chen estimated that Zheng Jiang would definitely agree to Red Star taking a 40% stake.

As for Pinduoduo, which appeared early in this timeline, Chen Chen had decisively invested when Guan Yushi came to ask Red Star to join the platform. He later added another investment, bringing the total to approximately 70 million us dollars for a 16% stake.

As for ByteDance, Chen Chen had invested 10 million us dollars starting from the angel round, followed by another 2 million us dollars in the Series A round.

Aside from these large-scale investments, the rest were basically small investments and acquisitions, with each costing a few million at most. These investments and incubations in the ecosystem chain had already shown results this year.

Currently, IoT business revenue accounted for 2.3% of Red Star's total revenue, up from less than 1% last year—nearly tripling. As the number of products increases in the future, this proportion will continue to rise.

It wasn't that Red Star didn't want to get involved in the semiconductor industry chain right now; they simply didn't have the capital to play. Whether it was the wafer industry or the lithography industry, throwing Red Star's entire annual revenue into those industries would barely make a sound, let alone produce results.

These were industries counted in tens or hundreds of billions. Even if the Systems Department provided certain technologies, Chen Chen got goosebumps just thinking about trying to enter the field relying solely on capital.

A single production line costs hundreds of millions, and building a factory requires the highest level of cleanroom standards. Especially looking at that long string of nines at the end of the specifications, it was enough to give anyone a headache.

Then there was the screen industry. Red Star didn't plan to get involved in that; their cooperation with China Star was excellent. Samsung had also withdrawn from China Star last year, and the current shareholding structure of the company consisted of TCL, Shenzhen State-owned Assets, and Red Star.

Previously, Xiao Ai had provided the technology and processes for flexible OLED screens, but a long time had passed since then, and the joint laboratory had practically no news. From mastering the technology to trial production and then mass production, it probably wouldn't happen within two years. (As for evaporation machines and all that mess, let's just assume China Star can handle it.)

However, Chen Chen believed that once that screen went into mass production, it would have a huge impact on the entire Chinese OLED screen market.

Because he had asked Old Li, and the screen provided by the system was roughly similar to the diamond arrangement Samsung applied for this year. Chen Chen blurted out, 'Isn't that a diamond-like arrangement?'

This was roughly 2023 technology, a screen pixel arrangement chosen by domestic manufacturers to bypass Samsung's diamond arrangement.

When Samsung first applied AMOLED screens to mobile phones in 2008, it used the RGBG PenTile arrangement. Due to the self-illuminating nature of OLED, the lifespan of the three RGB sub-pixels (the standard LCD pixel arrangement has one pixel corresponding to three RGB sub-pixels) is not the same, with the blue pixel having the shortest lifespan.

In a standard RGB arrangement, screen burn-in would occur relatively easily. To balance the lifespan of the three pixels, Samsung chose the RGBG PenTile arrangement.

The advantage of this arrangement is that whenever the screen needs to display a complete pixel, different sub-pixel points will share a sub-pixel from the side, forming the full RGB primary colors through 'color borrowing.'

This allows for better display effects with lower sub-pixel rendering, but because sub-pixel points are borrowed, the actual number of sub-pixels is reduced by one-third, naturally causing clarity to drop.

On the Galaxy S2 launched by Samsung in 2011, they tried the standard RGB arrangement again. Although the precision was better, Samsung abandoned it due to lifespan issues.

On the Galaxy S4 launched by Samsung this year, they used the Diamond arrangement, which would remain the best for the next decade or so.

It wasn't that Chen Chen hadn't thought about applying for a patent for the diamond arrangement, but he found out upon inquiry that it had already been applied for. Samsung was also using it through authorization from a USA company.

Then Chen Chen thought about acquiring that USA company, but before he could act, the wealthy Samsung had already bought the USA company that held the diamond arrangement patent.

In other words, in the future, Samsung's diamond arrangement screens would be authorized by themselves, as the company owning the patent belonged to Samsung.

And Red Star's next most important model really couldn't do without an AMOLED screen, because only this type of screen could use another packaging method to make the phone's chin smaller.

If they used the current COG packaging technology for LCD screens, the chin would be basically the same as the Xiaomi Mix from his previous life, reaching seven or eight millimeters.

For this reason, Chen Chen decided to have Dr. Zhou go to South Korea to see if they could purchase a batch of Samsung's OLED screens for next year's full-screen phones.

China Star had the technology and processes but simply couldn't produce them. Even if they started building the production line now, they would have to wait one or two years for it to go into operation.

Sigh!

How great would it be if, like other protagonists, the system just gave him a factory where he could give an order today and have it in production tomorrow?

Or at the very least, if the protagonist brought out the technology, the manufacturing company could master it the next day and produce it on the third day.

On this Blue Star, a planet crawling with transmigrators, he was probably the most frustrated one.

He had no money or technology to do semiconductors, and while he had the technology for screens, he couldn't produce them. The only thing he led in was a battery, and it wasn't even a revolutionary product that could pack tens or hundreds of thousands of mAh into a single cell.

Difficult!

Difficult!

So difficult!