ETNews posted a couple of articles claiming that Samsung Mobile Display plans to start mass producing flexible AMOLEDs in 2012. This is actually consistent with what we hear from other experts - although Samsung officially said in December 2010 that the plan is to start mass production in 2013-2014. ETNews says that the recent joint-venture with Ube Kosan on Polyimide production means that the development process of the new technology is complete and Samsung now focuses on production technologies.

Samsung's flexible AMOLEDs will be fabricated on a plastic (Polyimide) substrate and will be able to withstand high temperature (up to 350-400 degrees). The displays can be bendable - and rolled down to a two centimeter radius. ETNews says that Samsung will use the new displays in mobile phones, tablets and also watches and glasses. Here's a nice video showing the flexible displays:

OSD Displays announced two new PMOLED displays. The first is the OSD25664P0909-10, a 3.12" 256x64 monochrome display available in blue, white or yellow. This display offers at least 40,000 hours lifetime (D50). Here's a nice video OSD sent us showing these new displays:

The second PMOLED display announced is a character display. There are two version, 16x2 and 20x2, available in five colors (Green, Amber, White, Blue and Red). They offer 10,000:1 contrast and a wide viewing angle. OSD can embed English, Japanese, European and Russian characters and also offers these with a PCB option similar to that of Standard Monochrome LCD if needed. The operating temperature is -40C to 70C (storage temperature -40C to 85C). Samples of these displays are already shipping.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the 7th round of SSL projects, totalling $15 million for OLED and LED lighting research, product development and production projects. One of the two production projects is headed by Moser Baer. The DOE will give $2.9 million (and Moser Baer will add $1 million) to reduce the cost of manufacturing OLED lighting panels. Moser Baer's pilot production line in Canandaigua, NY will be used to demonstrate these manufacturing improvements.

Prototype OLED lamps by UDC

Moser Baer's pilot production line is built together with Universal Display and uses UDC's PHOLED technology. The project was already awarded $8.3 million by the DOE back in January.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and Korea's Renetec will jointly build an OLED lighting fab in Gwangju, South Korea. The project will cost around 140 million Euro, and the Fraunhofer will apparently invest up to 25% of that sum (35 million Euro).

We don't have any more details at this time. Back in October 2010 the Fraunhofer IPMS Institute unveiled new OLED lighting panels called TABOLA (the full name is TABOLA OLED Light Tablets), set to be fabricated at COMEDD and released in Q1 2011 (which didn't happen yet). Perhaps these panels will be produced in the new plant - although it will probably take quite a while to finish the plant so they may develop newer and better panels by then.

There are reports that Jusung Engineering signed an agreement with the government of Morocco to develop OLED technology. It's not clear what the details exactly are, but Jusung says this could help them penetrate the European market. Perhaps they seek to actually open an OLED lighting fab there? We do not know yet.

An OLED lighting panel made by Jusung

Jusung is a Korean maker of semiconductor and display manufacturing equipment. The company announced in April 2011 that they were entering the OLED market - for both display and lighting. Jusung will offer a 'total solution' - from vacuum deposition to encapsulation. They also said they are seeking to establish a joint-venture outside of Korea to enter the worldwide OLED lighting market - so it seems that they have done that in Morocco now.

Update: we've got some more info about the new joint venture, see below

There's an interesting report that Sony and Toshiba plan to join forces in a new display unit, aiming for small/medium displays (for mobile phones and tablets). According to the report, the new unit will establish an OLED fab in Higashiura, Japan. In fact once they setup the new unit, Toshiba Mobile Display (TMDisplay) and Sony Mobile Display will cease to exist. The new unit will be in charge of all OLED R&D by both companies. Interestingly, the Innovation Network Corp (a Japanese government fund) will fund the new company and will own around 70%-80%.

Sony hybrid printed OLED prototype

Sony is already producing OLEDs in a very small scale (mostly for their high-end broadcasting monitors) while Toshiba's mobile display unit (TMDisplay) scrapped their OLED plan back in October 2010 to focus on LCDs. It'll be great news if these two companies will indeed start to mass produce OLED displays.

Sony announced that their second-gen portable gaming console (the PSP2) will be called Vita. The Vita will cost $249 for the Wi-Fi version for $299 for the 3G one. In Europe it will cost €249 and €299. The vita will ship worldwide towards the end of 2011.

Sony's second-generation mobile gaming console features a 5" touch OLED display (960x544), a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and a quad-core PowerVR (SGX543MP4+) GPU (Sony says that it is as powerful as a PS3), Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and 3G (AT&T, optional). Gaming controls include dual analog sticks, motion controls and a multi-touch pad on the rear side.

The Korea Times reported that another Univeral Display patent was invalidated in Japan (bringing the total patents to three) - and that these patents are also being challenged in Korea (by Duksan) and in Europe. This caused UDC's stock to plummet. We knew about 2 patents back in March.

Steven Abramson, UDC's CEO responded to this in a technology investor conference. The company says that indeed Japan's court invalidated three of their patents. The basic PHOLED patent is still valid until 2018 in Japan, and this does not harm their entire portfolio. They will appeal to the Japanese high court, and in any case this only relates to products being made, used and sold in Japan - so it doesn't really pose a problem to the company.

Mirasol is a MEMS based reflective color display technology from Qualcomm. The company is already producing in small scale and are building a $1 billion factory in Taiwan. First panels are aimed towards e-readers (5.7") but the company has also recently unveiled a mobile phone prototype with a 4.1" color display.

While Mirasol displays offer video and color and are very power efficient, they also suffer from washed colors, and of course the screens aren't "bright" as they are reflective (although Mirasol thinks that edge lighting might be an option). Mirasol themselves admit that they cannot compete in the smart phone market yet - but interestingly we now hear that their CEO says that brighter displays are on the roadmap - and 'eventually' they could compete with OLED displays.

A few months ago we reported that Samsung Mobile Display (SMD) will raise 3.4 trillion won (about $3 billion) from its parent companies (Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDI). Today we learned that Samsung Electronics increased its stake to 64.4% and SDI now has 35.6% (the joint-venture was split 50-50 before). Apparently there are reports that Samsung Electronics wants to take over SMD entirely, but SDI claims that this is not true and they want to keep their stake.

The money will be used to boost SMD's AMOLED production capacity. This investment is part of Samsung's massive $4.8 billion OLED budget in 2011.