Flat panel display manufacturing depends more and more on plasma processing. This is particularly the case in the fabrication of the thin film transistor (TFT) array for active matrix liquid crystal displays (AMLCD's). Besides PVD of metals or metallic compound films by magnetron sputtering, and PECVD of amorphous silicon (aSi) and silicon nitride or oxide, plasma dry etching is gradually taking over wet etching, still abundantly used in first and second generation fabrication lines. We will focus on process issues, reactor concepts, and architectures of processing tools for PECVD and plasma dry etching, both performed in RF-excited glow discharges. The evolution of process demand in PECVD goes towards i) a better control of film and interface quality to achieve thinner TFT's and improved aSi TFT mobilities, ii) the deposition of aSi films suitable for laser crystallization to produce polycrystalline Si TFT's, and iii) the deposition silicon oxide instead of nitride as gate insulator. For dry etching the general trends are i) the development of dry-etching of metal source and drain contacts which is very critical in the back-channel etch TFT technology, ii) the reduction of the number of masks trend by etching multilayers of metals, and iii) etching of the ITO pixels. The increasing size of glass substrates to (up to 1 m2) imposes severe constraints on the design of reactors, to insure process uniformity, deposited film quality, and control of etch profiles. The most widely used concept still remains the classical capacitively-coupled RF discharge configuration. But the scaling up of such sources involve problems such as the uniformity of RF power distribution and gas feed on the electrodes. Moreoverreactive ion etching faces the problem that the RF discharge become more and more symmetric as the ratio of RF-powered electrode and grounded electrode areas tends towards unity. To overcome this problem of scaling-up, and provide control of the ion energy on the substrate, we have developed a new triode configuration (Piano reactor) involving a periodic structure of isolated bars with independent RF impedances to ground. Then comes the production issue related to the best way to achieve a large throughput. The debate is between the development of high rate plasma sources or processes with fast substrate handling in a cluster type configuration, or keeping moderate deposition and etch rate in stacks of reactor with parallel processing. Eventually reactor maintenance issues such as dry-cleaning after PECVD are critical.