Cambridge Display Technology has reached an agreement with IBM Corp. to market IBM's advanced amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology for organic-light-emitting-diode (OLED) displays.
CDT will market IBM's IP in TFT devices, pixel circuitry, drive methods, and active-matrix OLED display modeling for display applications. IBM will manage technology licensing agreements.
Luxell Technologies announced today that, as part of the ongoing business and technical partnership between the two companies, Hyundai LCD recently delivered to Luxell a prototype Enhanced Contrast Ratio (ECR) Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display incorporating Luxell's patented Black Layer(TM) contrast enhancement technology. This prototype is the first of its kind, and was manufactured on Hyundai's Small Molecule OLED pilot production line.
The device, having a 1.5" display, is the world's first full colour passive matrix OLED display featuring Black Layer(TM) technology produced in a cell-phone capable format and capable of displaying text, graphics and full motion video. Technical details of the visual performance parameters of the device and the manufacturing process used will be disclosed at the 2005 International Meeting on Information Display (IMID'05) in Seoul, Korea, July 19-23, 2005.
While Taiwan and Korea are expected to remain the dominant places where current and next-generation flat panel displays will be built, Japan has positioned itself become the dominant supplier for equipment used for manufacturing Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays.
Tokki and Ulvac lead the OLED race, according to iSuppli. Companies including DaiNippon Screen and Hitachi are offering R&D or pilot-scale equipment. In a bid to retain their advantage in this area, the Japanese are keeping many of their OLED secrets close to the vest. Having lost much of their manufacturing advantage in TFT-LCDs to Korean and Taiwanese companies over the last decade, Japanese companies have become more cautious. While this may help maintain Japan's lead in the short term, the lack of communications between Japan's equipment and panel makers and the rest of the industry is slowing the development and standardization of OLED equipment, iSuppli believes.
In recent years, AU Optronics' progress in OLED development is quite evident, attracting attentions at each turn. On show this time is the company's 2" full color AMOLED. With ultra high 10,000:1 contrast ratio and less than 1 ms response time, it displays immaculate quality motion pictures. Its exceptional capabilities make it ideal for handset filming or broadcasting multimedia MTV, which are increasing in market demand. This particular 2" AMOLED model is scheduled for mass production targeted for the higher-end markets. Another eye-catching handset model is a brand new 2.4" AMOLED mobile phone panel with QVGA resolution that is also attractive.
The new technology licence agreement provides Luxell with a world-wide exclusive licence for commercialization of NRC's electroluminescent flat panel display contrast enhancement technology, which is considered background intellectual property (IP) to Luxell's extensive Black Layer(TM) display contrast enhancement IP portfolio.
The combined IP portfolio provides Luxell the continued right to pursue global commercial licensing of its Black Layer(TM) contrast enhancement technologies, which recently have been optimized for application to the emerging Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technologies. This newly signed agreement supercedes a similar agreement previously executed by the parties in 2001, and will be in effect for up to four years.
Taiwan's Luxpro unveiled two new digital music players bearing a superficial resemblance to Apple Computer's IPod Shuffle player at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week.
The Top Tangent and EZ Tangent are new versions of the company's Super Tangent, which first appeared at the Cebit show in Germany in March and caused a stir because of its similarity to the Apple player. All three Luxpro players are small, thin, and rectangular in shape and have rounded corners. The navigation controls are arranged in a circle on the front, with settings switches on the reverse. A cap covers the USB connector.
Mobile phones could soon be getting a new look if a double-sided organic display developed by AU Optronics of Taiwan proves popular. The new active-matrix organic display (AMOLED) generates 1.5 inch-sized full-color images on both its front and rear surfaces and is controlled by a single IC driver chip.
In the new AMOLED structure, the sub-pixel area is divided into two regions designed for top-emission and bottom-emission. A transparent layer of indium tin oxide (ITO) is used as the anode in the bottom-emitting sub-pixels, while a reflective Ti/Al/Ti/ITO sandwich-type structure is used as the anode for top-emitting sub-pixels. Each side of the display has a resolution of 128x120 pixels, 16-bit color and a brightness of up to 150 nits and is capable of showing independent images.
Samsung SDI said its monthly sales of a key small-size display have doubled in the first two months of the second quarter, compared to the first quarter, on stronger demand for upscale handsets, sparking hopes for better results in the second half.
Samsung's PMOLED business posted average monthly sales of 1.3 mln units in April and May, up from the monthly average of 0.73 mln in the first quarter and 0.57 mln in the fourth quarter of 2004. 'Orders from clients are flooding in now. Sales of the product are expected to surge above three mln monthly average in the second half,' the company said in a statement. The company aims to sell 28 mln PMOLED units this year, double last year's 14 mln.
Toppoly has today announced its success in the development of 7-inch AMOLED display panel which is the largest sized AMOLED panel in Taiwan. The 7-inch AMOLED marks a breakthrough in Taiwan’s AMOLED industry as it is developed based on the advanced pixel compensation circuit, together with Toppoly’s proprietary high efficient white OLED and COA (Color Filter on Array) technologies.
The 7-inch AMOLED is an ideal display for high performance car TV and GPS system, supporting WVGA (800xRGBx480) with resolution up to 135ppi and 262K full color, and featured with Toppoly’s proprietary technologies of LTPS and OLED. The combination of in-house COA together with high efficient white OLED technology could be a better solution than traditional RGB side-by-side OLED in view of higher resolution and larger panel display. And most importantly, instead of using traditional 2T1C pixel design, Toppoly adopts its proprietary advanced pixel compensation circuit to solve the issue of luminance non-uniformity and thus the display quality is improved significantly. This prototype integrates scan and part of source driver ICs onto the panel, it adopts COG (Chip-On-Glass) module design that not only simplifies the designing of end products, but also increases the end product’s reliability with less power consumption.
