Earlier this month, KDDI showed a 3.1" WVGA (480x800) AMOLED, made by samsung. They said these will appear shortly, and today they announced two new phones with this display, both in the 'au' range - the KDDI W63H (Hitachi) and W63CA (Casio).

It seems like larger-sized AMOLEDs are finally getting into mass-market products, as in the last few weeks we have seen several A/V players and mobile phones with 3"+ OLED displays, for example the Cowon S9 Curve, the LG SU100, the Zeiss Photoscope 85 T* FL, and of course Kodak's 7" AMOLED photo frame.

Leadis announced sample availability of the LDS535, a 480 channel, one billion color AMOLED source driver IC, the first of many products the company is developing for the mid-size AM-OLED display market.

They are currently testing first silicon utilizing their Epic(TM) technology for AMOLED displays, and they also announced the first design win utilizes the Epic(TM) technology.

After receiving investments totaling billions of dollars over the past decade, the OLED industry is finally poised to take off. According to NanoMarkets, an industry analyst firm based here, the markets for OLED materials will reach $2.7 billion by 2015.

Universal Display Corporation today announced that it has received two $750,000 United States Department of Energy (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contracts. Work under these contracts will focus on demonstrating further advances in the performance of Universal Display's white OLED technology toward meeting the DOE's targets for solid-state lighting.

Using the Company's high-efficiency UniversalPHOLED technology, Universal Display will build a 6" x 6" white OLED lighting panel with targets of > 75 lm/W and an operating lifetime of over 35,000 hrs at 1,000 cd/m² initial luminance. Based on results previously obtained on much smaller test pixels, this work will focus on a number of scale-up issues associated with the performance of a panel as a function of its size.

UDC is saying they have produced an ultra-thin flexible OLED display. The entire thing is less than 50 micrometer thick.

R.Ma from UDC says "We have chosen thin metal foils as the substrates for flexible displays because of their excellent thermal, mechanical and permeation barrier properties and good flexibility. Metal foils as thin as 25 mm have been used and planarization process has been developed. Another key challenge is to develop a flexible thin film permeation barrier. OLEDs degrade as a result of exposure to atmospheric oxygen and water. Working with Professor Wagner’s team at Princeton University, we have identified a flexible, highly impermeable barrier layer that is deposited from environmentally-friendly and inexpensive precursors in a single-chamber reactor. The lifetime of OLEDs encapsulated with the layers exceeds the industrial target of 1,000 hours and also the lifetime of conventionally sealed glass packaged OLEDs. Many materials are used in a flexible AMOLED: organic, inorganic and metallic systems."

Merck KGaA today announced the completion of an agreement to acquire the entire intellectual property (IP) portfolio of the company OLED-T with immediate effect. As we reported last month, OLED-T has gone into liquidation. We don't have any information on the financial side of this agreement.

OLED-T had an IP portfolio in the field of electron transport and phosphorescent-emitting materials for OLED application.

Our friend at the DisplayBlog, Jin, has written an interesting view on OLEDs. Basically he says that by the time OLEDs are available (around 2010, hopefully) LCD/PDP TVs might have better contrast, be just as thin and with the same color gamut - and obviously they will be cheaper when OLEDs first arrive. In fact he thinks that a 30" OLED will cost about as much as a 60" LCD - and he's probably right at that - I'm not sure however that everyone will want such huge TVs!

My take is a bit different. First of all, I believe that OLEDs will improve at a faster rate than LCD/PDP. It's true that much more money is invested in the older, more proven techs, but being a new technology OLEDs can enjoy a much faster rate of improvement (it's always like that with new tech).

Samsung Electronics are showing the 14.1" and 31" AMOLED TV this week at GITEX technolgy week 2008 (Dubai). Samsung is boasting that these are not prototypes, but rather "finished TV products".

The finished products weigh forty percent less than other LCD TVs of the same size while boasting a contrast ratio of 1 million to one, color gamut of 107% and brightness of 550 cd/m2. Samsung will begin commercial production of mid and large sized OLED TVs around 2010.

OSD announces the release of its new OSD0430WQLC-T a 4.3 inch diagonal WVGA Active Matrix Organic LED (AMOLED) module. This new full color module supports up to 16 million colors with a 24-bit parallel RGB interface. It also can support an 8-bit RGB serial interface.



The module has an overall size of 102.4 x 65.6 x 1.6mm. The 95.04 x 53.85mm active area supports a resolution of 480x272.



The new Active Matrix drive scheme offers many advantages over the previous Passive Matrix (PMOLED) drive scheme. Compared to full color PMOLEDs, Active Matrix OLEDs can achieve higher typical luminance (200 cd/m2 vs. 90 cd/m2), a better contrast ratio (10000:1 vs. 1000:1). and have lower overall power consumption



AMOLEDs also feature 170 degree viewing angles and temperature independent response time of less than 50uS. The fast response time coupled with frame rates of 60Hz allows flicker free images over the entire operating temperature range.

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