The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced its third round of funding for manufacturing R&D projects. The DOE will select between two and four project that will together receive $10 million. The DOE wants to fund projects that focus on achieving significant cost reductions through improvements in manufacturing equipment, processes, or monitoring techniques. They will accept applications through December 15, 2011.

The DOE announced four topic areas:

• Luminaire/module manufacturing
• Test and inspection equipment
• OLED deposition equipment
• OLED materials manufacturing

Nanomarkets posted a very interesting article about the OLED lighting industry - trying to answer whether it's realistic to expect commercialization by 2015.

Here are some of the main points they raise in the article:

• OLED lighting will not be commercially available before 2015.
• Nanomarkets assumes that the large lighting makers (such as GE, OSRAM, Philips) are investing in OLEDs because they believe that they will enter the general lighting market and will not remain a premium niche
• No plans for mass-production plants yet from anyone
• Nanomarket sees many small companies to emerge that will employ the fabless model - they will design panels but other companies (OLED lighting foundries) will produce them
• Low cost manufacturing technology isn't ready yet
• Lack of production capacity can be a major hurdle to the expansion of the OLED Lighting industry

Tokyo's Narita airport ordered several displays from Mitsubishi - including a 180-degree concave Diamond Vision OLED display called Panorama Vision. We don't have any more technical information about this display. Mitsubishi will also install two pairs of 330" LCDs and over 300 touch screen displays. Mitsubishi will begin to install the displays in March 2012 and they will be in full operation by the summer of 2012.

This is Mitsubishi's third Diamond Vision OLED installation that we know about. The first one was a 3.84x2.3 meter display installed at Merck's research center and the second was the 6" Geo-Cosmos sphere installed at Tokyo's Science Museum.

Konica Minolta announced a new next-generation lighting brand called Symfos. The first Symfos product is the OLED-010K OLED lighting panel sample kit - which is now shipping. The kit includes four OLED panels, and external driver box and an AC adapter.

The OLED itself uses all phosphorescent emitters (KM is using Universal Display's PHOLED technology) and offers 45 lm/W. This is the same panel that Philips is offering (as the Lumiblade Plus). In fact Philips is producing this panel for Konica Minolta, as was announced in July 2011. We do not know the price of the OLED-010K kit, but Philips is selling each Lumiblade Plus panel for €120.

The Fraunhofer IPMS are developing a roll-to-roll process to make flexible large area OLED lighting panels. Next week they will show a 30cm wide flexible OLED lighting panel on a metal foil, fabricated at COMEDD. In fact they say that this demonstrates that they developed all necessary process steps for a complete production of flexible OLEDs in a roll-to-roll tool: from the structuring of substrate up to the lamination of barrier foils.

Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting (PIOL) signed a license agreement with Global OLED Technology (GOT) - LG's company which acquired all of Kodak's OLED business in 2009. PIOL now has the right to use some of GOT's OLED lighting patents and will pay a running royalty fee. Idemistu Kosan owns 32% of GOT (the rest is owned by LG) and 49% of PIOL.

PEW OLED Lighting panels

PIOL started shipping OLED lighting panel samples last month. The company also signed a license agreement with UDC.

Mitsubishi installed a curved Diamond Vision OLED display at the CEATEC 2011 exhibition. This display uses 696 PMOLED modules - each 32x32mm in size. Mitsubishi says that the pixel pitch is 3mm - which means that each module's resolution is 10x10.

This is actually a very small Diamond Vision OLED installation - compared to the gigantic OLED globe installed in Tokyo's science museum - which has 10,362 panels (!) - each 96x96mm in size...

Update 2: The Galaxy Nexus is now official - with a 4.65" Super AMOLED HD display. It isn't curved though as we hoped...

Update: Samsung and Google announced they are delaying the announcement of the new product. They said that this is not the right time "as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs's passing"

Samsung is hosting an event on October 11th (during the CTIA Enterprise & Applications show in San Diego) - apparantly together with Google. They released a short teaser that towards the end shows a mysterious curved device:

There are speculations that this is the next Google phone (perhaps called Nexus Prime) - that will include a curved Super AMOLED HD display. We don't have a lot to wait for this one! Hopefully they won't fail us like Apple just did yesterday. Here's the full (30 seconds) teaser video:

Apple hosted their iPhone event yesterday, and introduced the latest version - the iPhone 4S. It uses the same 3.5" Retina (LCD) display as the iPhone 4. The hardware upgrades are not very exciting: a faster processor (dual core A5) and an upgraded camera (8mp). It also includes a hybrid CDMA and GSM chipset.

A few weeks ago we started hearing rumors that the next iPhone (the iPhone 5) will include an OLED display. Even though such rumors circulated before each Apple product introduction, this time Samsung's AMOLED production capacity may indeed be high enough for Apple - so we're a bit disappointed. Of course, the iPhone 4S is a 'minor' update and not an entirely new device - and we're sure Apple is working on the iPhone 5. Will it be the first Apple OLED device? Time will tell...

Update: according to new reports, the OLED-A was wrong and Samsung are still using a Shadow-Mask to fabricate Super AMOLED HD displays

The OLED Association published a very interesting paper discussing Samsung's and LG Display's efforts to scale OLED production to large size panels (specifically 55" OLED TVs). In the article, they say that Samsung will use an LTPS substrate with a SMS (Small Mask Scanning) method, while LGD plans to use an Oxide TFT and Kodak's White OLED with color filters architecture. We already reported about Samsung's SMS method a few weeks ago.

The article includes a very interesting comparison of the different deposition methods (FMM, LITI, SMS, Printing and LG's RGBW). They also claim that the new display in the Samsung Galaxy II LTE HD was produced using LITI.