September 2011

Universal Display entered into an OLED technology license agreement with Pioneer Corporation. Pioneer will use company's UniversalPHOLED and other OLED technologies and will also purchase PHOLED materials - to be used for OLED lighting products. Pioneer will pay running royalties. The term of the agreement continues until Pioneer sells a specified amount of licensed products.

Pioneer has been using UDC's PHOLED materials in their PMOLED displays since 2003. The company has an OLED lighting joint-venture with Mitsubishi Chemicals - which will market Pioneer's panels under the Verbatim brand. Verbatim announced the color-tunable VELVE OLED lighting panels in February 2011, we're not sure if these are actually shipping yet as promised back in April.

Universal Display and PPG Industries announced that the two companies renewed their OLED supply and service agreement (originally signed in 2000). The current agreement runs through December 31, 2014 - and is "substantially" similar to the current agreement.

PPG Industries are exclusively producing UDC's PHOLED materials, which are then sold by UDC to their customers.

Novaled announced today that Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) became a shareholder in Novaled. We do not know the financial details of this deal, but this is obviously a strategic investment for Samsung (who uses Novaled's materials in their AMOLED panels). This is great news for the company (which is a long time sponsor of OLED-Info).

Novaled's latest financing round was in January 2009 (they raised $11.2 million back then). The company says that their 2010 revenue were €11.2 million - and this will probably double or more in 2011, following Samsung's capacity expansion and new 5.5-Gen fab. Back in March 2011 Ecosummit posted a couple of interesting Interviews - one with Novaled's CFO and the other with the company's Chief Scientist. Here's the CFO interview, which discusses their financial situation, technology and markets:

Samsung announced two new Galaxy SII variants - both with LTE, and both for the Korean market. The more interesting one is the Galaxy S II HD LTE which offers a 4.65" Super AMOLED HD display - offering 1280x720 resolution (316ppi, most likely with Pentile). The second phone is the Galaxy S II LTE which has a 4.5" 480 x 800 display (207ppi).

Beside the display, both phone feature LTE of course, a 1.5Ghz dual-core processor, 8mp camera (1080p video), 16GB of internal memory, Wi-Fi, GPS and NFC.

Samsung Electronics says that today they sold their 10 millionth Galaxy S2 smartphone. The S2 is the fastest selling phone ever for Samsung (the Star phone took 6 month to reach 10 million sales, and the Galaxy S took 7 months). The company also revealed that they sold 3.6 units in Korea, 3.4 units in Europe and 2.3 million in Asia. It just started selling in the US in the past few days...

Samsung's Galaxy S2 is the successor to the popular Galaxy S. It has a 4.3" WVGA Super AMOLED plus display, 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point.

The European Union launched a new initiative called OLAE+. They offer €18 million in collaborative R&D funding in the area of Organic & Large Area Electronics. OLEA+ is a competition that is open for participants from Austria, Catalonia, Flanders, Germany, Israel, Poland, Sweden and the UK, and first proposals must be submitted by January 31st 2012.

Possible applications for OLAE are rollable/flexible displays, large area efficient lighting, low cost solar cells, low-cost RFIDs and memories, flexible and environmental friendly batteries and more.

IMOLA (Intelligent light management for OLED on foil applications) is a new EU-funded (€5.1 million) project that aims to realize large-area OLED lighting modules with built-in intelligent light management. The idea is that light intensity can be adjusted uniformly or locally according to the time of day or a person's position - and applications include wall, ceiling and in-vehicle (dome) lighting.

IMOLA's OLED lighting module will consists of OLED tiles on a flexible backplane foil. Each tile can be individually controlled via the backplane. The intelligent part comes from a smart-power thin chip, advanced communication features and optical feedback.

HP has developed a new method to produce large AMOLED panels, based on roll-to-roll manufacturing. They say that one of the biggest challenges to make flexible OLEDs is the alignment on large area flexible substrates. The new solution uses self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) to laminate a well-defined micro OLED (µOLED) frontplane unto a flexible active matrix amorphous silicon TFT backplane.

SAIL process flow

HP says they already built a proof-of-concept AMOLED device - which contains a flexible µOLED frontplane with OLED sizes of 50 µm on PET and active matrix backplane on polyimide with pixel pitches of 1 mm. The company claims that the new method will enable large area OLEDs at a very low cost.

UK retailer Clove unveiled in a recent blog post that Samsung's Galaxy Note will arrive in the UK in November, and will cost around £500 ($770). The Note is available for pre-order.

Samsung's Galaxy Note is a large Android v2.3 phone/mini-tablet with a 5.3" Super AMOLED display with an HD resolution: 1280x800. Other specs include a dual-core 1.4Ghz processor, 8mp camera, touch display with pen input (it has a stylus). The phone is 9.65mm thick and weights 178 grams.

The rumors were true - Motorola unveiled the Droid RAZR with a 4.3" qHD Super AMOLED display...

There are some rumors surfacing that Motorola are working towards a new Android LTE phone with a 4.3" qHD (960x540) Super AMOLED display (this will be the first device to sport such a display if true!). Other features include 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, 8mp camera and Full-HD (1080p) video encoding. The new phone will be called the Spyder, or the Droid RAZR or perhaps Droid HD...

Interestingly, our own source told us a few days ago that Motorola will start using AMOLED displays in their new phones - so this gives some credit to this rumor. What's even more interesting, is that our source is the same one behind the new Apple iPhone 5 OLED rumor...