(Yicai) Sept. 23 -- BOE Technology Group will commit more than CNY80 billion (USD11.9 billion) to research and development, including on integrated optoelectronics, and over CNY800 billion (USD119.3 billion) to procurement over the next five years, according to the chairman of China’s largest producer of display panels.

The Beijing-based company will finalize investment plans within the next 12 months for mass-production lines for glass-based perovskite solar cells and glass-based substrates for advanced semiconductor packaging, while accelerating the development of platforms for emerging optoelectronic integration technologies and the commercial rollout of related products, Chen Yanshun said at the BOE Innovation Partner Conference yesterday.

BOE has already built a pilot production line for glass-based perovskite solar cells and has begun shipping products for multiple applications, Chen noted, adding that the company has also verified the manufacturing process for glass substrates and related products are in is joint development.

Moreover, BOE has built an ecosystem cooperation platform for short-reach optical interconnects, drawing on its accumulated micro light-emitting diode technology, Chen pointed out.

At the conference, BOE showcased its newly developed ultra-large-size glass substrates that support advanced packaging for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence chips.

These new businesses should strengthen BOE’s capabilities in underlying materials and devices for internet of things, AI, and optoelectronics integration, Chen said.

Perovskite glass substrates are the base material for perovskite photovoltaic cells. Glass substrates embedded with micro LED chips can be fabricated into optical interconnection modules to meet the high-bandwidth, low-latency, and low-power high-speed interconnection requirements of HPC and AI chips.

Chen noted that in the artificial intelligence era, traditional chip architectures face two bottlenecks: power consumption and bandwidth. Pushing beyond these two limitations requires the integrated development of optical and electronic technologies, he said.

On BOE’s earnings conference call yesterday, Chen expressed his hope that the company’s glass-based packaging substrate business reaches the conditions required for an investment decision on mass production by the first half of next year, preferably during the first quarter.

BOE also plans to develop short-reach optical interconnect products, establish packaging technology platforms, and make related industrial investments over the next year, according to Chen. “The underlying substrate used in optoelectronic packaging will be BOE's own glass-based substrate,” he noted.

BOE announced in May that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with US materials giant Corning to cooperate on four cutting-edge application technologies: glass substrates, foldable glass, perovskite glass substrates, and optical interconnects.

BOE’s shares [SHE: 000725] closed 0.3 percent higher at CNY6.02 (90 US cents) each in Shanghai today, bringing the stock’s year-to-date gain to 42 percent.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione