Although Corning Inc. is strongly entrenched in the liquid crystal display (LCD) glass market, the company appears to have more than a passing interest in the fledgling market for OLED display technology.

Corning is in the early stages of R&D on possibly developing a new glass composition optimized for polysilicon OLEDs, according to Peter Bocko, division vice president and director of commercial technology for Corning’s Display Group, in an interview in New York Friday (March 24).

The 10th international OLEDs conference, OLEDs Asia 2006, will be held from 24th to 26th April 2006 at the Hilton Singapore. In the past, OLEDs Asia has been a breeding ground for leading developers, manufacturers, and end users of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) to discuss the potential in flat panel displays, general illumination and automotive applications in Asia. Never before has a forum for OLED leaders been as necessary as it is now, when production yields and manufacturing costs are hindering OLED products from reaching the market.

Special attention will be paid to the current status of OLED-based displays in the marketplace, including cellphone displays, MP3 players, and automotive interiors. Cochaired by Samsung Electronics and Eastman Kodak and sponsored by Aixtron, Osram, BASF, Novaled, Zygo, Kodak, Photonics Spectra and Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, OLEDs Asia 2006 provides an opportunity to cultivate valuable business relationships with the biggest and the best.

Driven by cards and small public viewing screens, the flexible display panel market is expected to grow from $5 million in 2006 to $339 million in 2013, or 83.5 percent a year, according to iSuppli Corp.

Display types being used for flexible screens include LCD, Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED), electrophoretic and electrochromic. Flexible display technology has over the past year made progress in resolving technical and process issues, but remains behind on application and product development.

South Korea’s Samsung SDI said it target its fledgling active-matrix OLED display business at high-end mobile TV phones when it launches next January. Samsung SDI is scheduled to complete the first line of its $450 million active-matrix OLED plant in Cheonan by the end of this year. The plant will produce the equivalent of 20 million 2 to 2.6-inch displays annually for digital multimedia broadcasting-enabled phones, Samsung said.

"Initially, we will target the mobile TV phone market and then expand the territory to the 40 inch-level television market in two or three years," said Lee Woo-Jong, vice president of Samsung SDI’s Mobile Display Business. "We plan to increase the annual AM OLED production capacity to 100 million units by 2008 to meet an expected strong demand for higher-resolution displays for mobile TV phones."

Samsung SDI claims its 4th-generation AM OLED is the first to use a low-temperature polysilicon base material. AM OLED can switch pixels 10,000 times faster than TFT-LCDs, fast enough to render moving images without ghosting.

Universal Display has been awarded a $500,000 extension to a successfully completed Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract from the U.S. Army Communication Electronics Research and Development Engineering Center (CERDEC).

This extension builds on previous advances Universal Display (Ewing, N.J.) made in developing full-color, active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) displays fabricated on a flexible metal foil substrate, based on the company's proprietary technologies and materials. The focus of the contract extension is to incorporate a laminated protective layer to the flexible AMOLED display, as well as to develop additional communications functionality and to integrate the display into a wrist-mountable housing.

Advance Nanotech announced significant findings in a research project exploring new techniques for powering flexible displays. The project, a collaboration with the Center for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) at the University of Cambridge, UK, aims to meet the critical need for the coming generations of flexible displays in folding PDAs, laptops and electronic paper by employing nano structured materials incorporating carbon nanotubes.

The recent growth in the portable display industry has been dominated by liquid crystal (LCD) and organic light emitting (OLED) displays. Critical to migrating these technologies to a flexible platform is the development of flexible transparent conductors.

Leadis Technology enhanced its OLED porfolio with production-volume shipments of a new OLED display driver IC, the LDS518 aimed for MP3 and mobile phone applications.

The LDS518 is a high-performance, highly-integrated device featuring 16K- bit of display RAM (128 x 64 x 2 bit), an on-chip oscillator and flexible frame frequency adjustment without the need for external components. The LDS518 has a maximum resolution of 128 x 64 and allows programmable display features such as divided area display with flashing function per divided area and two screen saver modes, which are critical for extending OLED display lifetime, extending mobile device battery life, and reducing the need for additional software development to support these functions.

COLED Technologies Incorporated today announced that it had changed its name to Dynamic Organic Light, Inc. The name change is a part of the company’s marketing strategy and does not reflect change in either the company’s management or ownership. The decision to change the company’s name was brought about by the need to more accurately portray the company’s technology, which is the development of advanced organic electro-luminescent materials for the flat panel display industry.

The OLED Design Contest is a design idea’s competition. It is based on the concept to image the future of lighting system.

The contest has been launched with the aim of connecting the research activities with the future commercialization aspects of the OLED elements. Based on extreme innovation features of OLED technology, participants are invited to submit solutions on different market fields. The contest intends to be a tool focused to highlight originality and versatility of this new technology by taking advantage of the peculiarity that differentiate it from other different illumination technologies. The contest is open to everybody but it is mainly targeted for Architecture and Design students and professionals.
Individuals and teams are encouraged to submit entries in order to gain two recognitions of €5.000,00 and €2.000,00. In addition, there will be the possibility to realize a prototype of the best project.

Archos introduces a 4GB MP3 player dubbed Archos 104.
The Archos 104 support Microsoft's PlayForSure and feature a 1.5" OLED screen, photo viewer, icon user interface and USB 2.0. The 4GB storage are actually provided by a hard-drive and not flash like the Apple iPod nano.

Archos is replacing the Gmini XS 100 with the Archos 104. I already like the fact that Archos simplified the naming of the new player. The new Archos 104 measures 91x43x14mm and weighs 80g. The new Archos player will sell for 199 Euros (~$239) starting in May.