The final symposium of the OLLA OLED lighting project took place on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven Netherlands 12.6.08 with about 80 attending the exhibition and about 60 attending the half day conference. The objective is to start the work that will lead to replacement of many of the "6 billion lights that the world buys every year". Presentations from OLLA, Siemens, Novaled, Fraunhofer IPMS, Philips Lighting OLED Development and Royal Philips Electronics and the exhibition alongside revealed that the objectives had been met or exceeded. These objectives embraced laboratory demonstration of sharply improved life for 1000 cd/m2 emission and larger panel size etc, compared to what was available when the project was conceived five years ago.

Polymer OLEDs, despite being printable, were bypassed early on to concentrate on glass sandwiches of small molecule OLEDs. Here, phosphorescent layers exhibited poor life so the long life Novaled PIN OLED construction was favored. All this had echoes of Philips earlier abandoning P-OLEDs on the same campus.

In June 2008, I had the chance of interviewing Dr. Geoff Williams, Topless's project manager. Geoff has a PhD from University of Durham, and later worked in Philips Displays and he now works in Thorn lighting.

RiTDisplay has developed passive-matrix OLED touch panels. The panels come in 3 sizes (1.1", 1.8", 3.1"), and are ready for production.

The new panels use STMicro's controller ICs.

Read more here (Digitimes)

LG Display formally launched an organic light emitting diode (OLED) division at its Gumi plant in North Gyeongsang Province on Thursday.

LG Display will first focus on developing and producing small products but expand business to producing medium-sized to large televisions, the company said.

It's a bit late, but here are some interesting things that Epson showed at SID this year. First of all is a 8" OLED display for Automotive applications. Epson says that they are in talks with several auto companies to embed those devices in the dash board. You can see a video of the displays in the link below. Epson also showed other OLED displays, including a portable DVD player prototype.

DisplayBlog's Jin Kim talked to Mr. Satoru Miyashita, General Manager of OLED Development Center. Miyashita-san explained that Epson’s OLED displays were manufactured at the company’s G2 R&D fab. He also shared that there are plans to expand OLED production capability by adding a line in the company’s G3 fab located in Tottori. By using a larger G3 fabrication plant, Epson can produce up to 14" OLEDs.

CMEL expects its yield for AMOLED panels rise to 85% by the end of 2008 from the present 70%, and the company is mulling installing a new production line (5G or 5.5G) for the segment sometime in the future, according to company president Douglas Park.

The company's second line will be operational in October, and CMEL expects about 800,000 units (2.8") per month from both lines. CMEL plans to make large-size segments in 2010.

Read more here (Digitimes) 

I have just learned from AUO that they have resumed their OLED operation in January 2008. As you may recall, in 2007 AUO stopped their OLED production, and relocated all OLED engineers to their LCD business. AUO has done a lot of research into AMOLEDs in the past years, and the first AMOLED phone (the BenQ S88) used their 2" AMOLED display.

AUO used UDC's PHOLED materials, and I understand that they are likely to still use PHOLEDs in the new OLEDs.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) reports that it got authorization from ITRI (Taiwan's Research Institute) to use their organic TFT (OTFT) tech. CPT will be developing active-matrix flexible displays.

Read more (digitimes)

Whether or not this will actually happen is still to be determined. Oxide semiconductor technology for display applications is not a mature technology and repeatability is said to be a significant issue. Currently all AMOLEDs in mass production are fabricated with some version of ELA or solid phase crystallization. Sony is investing in a dTLA (Diode Thermal Laser Annealing) pilot line to prove the manufacturability of its µc-Si technology. Others pursuing direct deposit p-Si, RTA (Rapid Thermal Annealing) and other techniques to overcome the continued uniformity, cost and scaling problems related to ELA. But, at least, the strong interest by the SID paper selection committee and the impressive results shown by Samsung SDI and others, suggest that oxide semiconductors are a technology to keep a close eye on when evaluating future AMOLED opportunity.

Read more here (DisplaySearch blog)