WAC Lighting announced two new OLED lamps. Both use square OLED lighting panels that feature a color temperature of 4000K, a CRI of 80 and an efficacy of over 32 lm/W. We do not know which company produced the OLEDs.

The Vela OLED chandelier is an aluminum made lamp that has 24 OLED lighting panels. 12 panels illuminate surfaces below and 12 additional panels shine upwards - to render a "soft ambiance that evokes a lighter sense of space and visual comfort". The light output is 2040 lumens at 58 watts (35.2 lm/W). The lamp is suspended by aircraft cables, and the height is adjustable (up to 36 inches).

Universal Display and L-3 Display Systems have delivered an unbreakable plastic-based knee-mounted AMOLED display system prototype to the US Air Force. The project aims to build an ejection-safe electronic flight bag system designed to replace the paper maps and checklists traditionally held on the pilot’s knee.

The display (which uses UDC's PHOLED materials) is 4.3" in size and features 480x320 resolution on a plastic substrate system. This is the third product design that UDC and L-3 has developed. Back in October 2010, together with LG they delivered 8 flexible wrist-worn prototypes (also 4.3" but with lower resolution: 320x240). Interestingly, back in 2009 UDC was awarded $750,000 to develop an ejection-safe display for the US Air Force, but back then the project called for a 6" display.

Samsung had a very big presence at SID 2012 - showing all sorts of OLED panels, from small ones to large 55" panels. Obviously the most interesting item on display was the 55" OLED TV. As I said before, these OLED TVs are simply stunning, beautiful colors and images and even the 3D effects were great.

Samsung was showing 3 TVs: one showing regular 2D images, the other 3D images (you needed to use active shutter glasses of course) and the final one showing dual-view images (you use the glasses but each user sees and hears a different Full-HD image altogether). I went to the booth several times (and was also invited for a one-on-one guided press tour) - but in all the excitement I forgot to actually shoot a video...

First-O-Lite has sent us an update regarding their OLED lighting R&D progress. The company have successfully developed a hybrid tandem WOLED lighting device, which features 77.2 lm/W and a CRI of 87.2 (@2090 cd/m²). The CIE is (0.46, 0.42).

The company's Gen-1 production line will be able to produce samples by the end of the year. They are also developing a Gen-2 production line (in a $40 million investment) that will be able to produce "large sized" panels by early 2013. The plan is to use the Gen-2 fab to make small-scale production for early market development.

Mitsubishi Chemical and Pioneer have jointly developed OLED elements produced using a wet coating process for the light-emitting layers. The two companies will establish a testing facility with an aim to commercialize this technology for OLED lighting mass production by 2014.

Mitsubishi's and Pioneer's OLED coating project began in January 2010, and in May 2011 the companies announced that they managed to fabricate a white OLED in which the emissive layer was formed in a coating process. That OLED featured 52 lm/W and a lifetime (LT50) of 20,000 hours (@1,000cd/m² luminance). The new panel produced now features 56 lm/W and a lifetime (LT70) of 57,000 hours (@1,000cd/m² luminance) which is quite an improvement.

AUO was supposed to start producing 4" to 5" AMOLED panels in Q2 2012, but new reports say that AUO's yields are still very low (less than 20%) and so they have delayed mass production to Q3 2012. The same reports suggest that AUO got orders for 4.3" qHD AMOLED panels from HTC and is likely to get orders from Nokia as well.

AUO first AMOLED plant is a Gen-3.5 fab that has a monthly capacity of about 8,000 substrates. The company is also planning to later start producing at their Singapore Gen-4.5 fab (at AFPD). According to the new reports, the company was considering a 5.5-Gen AMOLED fab as well, but isn't likely to go ahead with that plan due to the low yields from the 3.5-Gen fab. Earlier reports suggested that AUO was considering a 6-Gen fab for large size panels (for OLED TVs).

The US DOE announced a new round of solid-state lighting investment (it's the third one since 2010). Of the three projects selected, there's one relates to OLEDs. K-Space Associates were granted $800,000 (out of $1.2 million ) to develop high-precision measurements of OLED layers during mass production using the company's existing optical monitoring technology.

K-Space's tool will measure layer thickness and composition to ultimately improve the efficiency, color, and lifetime of OLEDs. They hope that this development will serve as a platform for future large-scale OLED production facilities.

Sony has developed a 9.9" 960x540 (111ppi) flexible OLED panel, using an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and a WOLED-CF architecture (RGBW). The thickness of this panel is only 110 um. To make this panel, Sony used two glass substrates (for the backplane and the color filters) during the production process, which were later removed. This allows Sony to use their regular OLED manufacturing process. We're not sure what kind of material is used as the final substrate.

The small-molecule OLED materials were deposited using vapor deposition. Unfortunately the company didn't demonstrate this panel at SID.

Samsung Mobile Display (now part of Samsung Display) announced that it has produced 200 million AMOLED panels - since mass production started in January 2007. You can see SMD's CEO and officials celebrating below:

Samsung has produced AMOLEDs at an average of over 100,000 panels a day. But their capacity is growing quickly: it took them four years and five months to produce the first 100 million panels and just 11 months to produce another 100 million panels!

Here's a funny video (presented by the EU COLEA project) showing why organic electronics (including OLED lighting and displays) is better: