The premier display industry conference, SID 2012 took place at the beginning of June 2012, and it seems that OLED technology and displays were the focus of this year's show, with Samsung's and LGD's OLED TV units were the hit of the show. I published several blog posts, detailing my updates from SID from all the companies that I visited and met with:

• Universal Display: new emitter materials, bezel-free transparent panel and more
• Samsung: 55" OLED TV panels and smaller mobile AMOLED panels
• LG Display: 55" OLED panels, bullish forecasts
• eMagin: OLED microdisplays updates
• RiTdisplay: a-Si based AMOLED production by the end of 2012
• Ignis Innovation: a-Si compensation technology advances, 20" AMOLED prototypes
• Quantum Dots: updates from Nanosys and QDVision
• Novaled: new materials and OLED lighting prototypes
• Chimei Innolux: AMOLED production in Q4 2012, but very low volume throughout 2013
• Corning: flexible OLED glass, Lotus glass updates
• Dupont: new materials and nozzle-printing updates
• HyeLCD: still making PMOLED panels
• FDC: flexible OLED displays on show
• Tianma: AMOLED prototypes, mass production only in 2014
• Fraunhofer: bi-directional OLED microdisplays
• OLED-A: OLED market forecasts

Indonesian phone maker Nexian launched a new phone called the Nexian Glaze M-9090 which sports a 2.4" transparent OLED. The phone costs $90.

OLEDNet says that the OLED panel is made by Neoview Kolon. That's the first time we hear of NK actually producing transparent panels. They have been showing prototypes for a while though, including 2.4" panels indeed. It may also be that this is a panel made by Futaba, who's been producing 2.4" transparent PMOLEDs for a while.

Verbatim started shipping the Velve OLED lighting evaluation kit back in May 2011, and last month they sent us a unit for review. This is the world's first (and only) color-tunable OLED lighting panel, and it's pretty exciting.

Air Liquide says it has been selected to supply ultra-pure carrier and electronic specialty gases to three new fabs manufacturing advanced display technologies, such as OLEDs, LTPS, MEMS, and OLED backlighting (we assume they mean OLED lighting). The fabs are located in Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. All those fabs will produce small/medium displays for smart phones and tablets.

We know of new OLED fabs in all those locations: in Japan several companies (such as Lumiotec, Mitsubishi and Panasonic) are producing OLED lighting panels. Both CMI and AUO in Taiwan are gearing up toward AMOLED production, and in Singapore AFPD (a 4.5-Gen LTPS fab owned by AUO) is also upgrading the LTPS LCD fab to OLED production. Any of these fabs may have selected Air Liquide's product.

COMEDD is the Center for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices, based in Dresden. In 2009, COMEDD was established as a department in at the Fraunhofer IPMS, with an aim to carry out customer R&D and pilot fabrication of vacuum-processed organic materials applications. Three and a half years later, COMEDD is now an independent institute at Fraunhofer, no longer part of the IPMS.

The Fraunhofer COMEDD clean room consists of the following equipment:

• A pilot line for the fabrication of OLEDs on 370 x 470 mm² substrates
• Two pilot lines for 200 mm wafer for the OLED integration on silicon substrates
• A research line for the roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible substrates.

Samsung announced today that Samsung Display begun conducting business as a new independent company, formed as a merger between Samsung Mobile Display and S-LCD. Samsung says that the new company is the world's largest display maker with 39,000 employees and seven production facilities worldwide. Oh-hyun Kwon, vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, was elected CEO of Samsung Display. The corporate slogan is 'displays beyond imagination'.

The new company will produce both LCD and OLED panels for mobile devices and TVs, but it seems that the focus will be on OLEDs. Here's a quote from Samsung's PR announcing the Samsung Display spin-off back in February, stating the importance of OLED technology:

Raymond Soneira, the display guru from DisplayMate visited SID and inspected the OLED TV panels on show from both Samsung and LG. He really liked LG's prototype - and says it was "absolutely stunning, visually it was the most impressive TV I have ever seen". The one thing he didn't like is the glossy screen.

Regarding Samsung's OLED TV, he was less impressed. It was very nice, but "definitely not in the stunning category like the LG 3D OLED TV". He said the demo was mediocre and the 2D images were actually "horrendous because its color saturation was turned up so high that it was beyond gaudy and into visually repulsive territory". Hopefully users will be able to calibrate their color preferences - for guys like Raymond who prefers accuracy over saturation.

Riber announced they have received a new order to supply OLED effusion cells to an existing customer in Asia, supporting the customer's production line expansion. These cells will be be used to produce OLEDs for smartphones. This is a continuation of previous orders in 2010 and 2011.

Effusion cells are used in vacuum deposition processes - which is the process in which all OLED panels are made today. It's highly likely that the Asian customer is Samsung.

Konica Minolta announced that the OLED-010K OLED sample kits they have been offering since October 2011 are now discontinued, and they are offering OLED sample panel sets instead. The new sample panel set includes 5 OLED panels (and does not include a driver box and an AC adapter like the sample kits).

The new sample panel set costs ¥100,000 (about $1,250), and is now shipping. You can order it here.

A few weeks ago we reported that BOE Display started construction of their 5.5-Gen AMOLED fab in Ordos (Inner Mongolia). It seems that this is indeed true as BOE Display now details the new fab in their company profile brochure:

According to the brochure, the fab will produce 54K substrates a month, and will produce both LCD and AMOLED panels on LTPS backplanes. According to earlier reports, the fab cost is estimated at $3.44 billion. BOE's plan is apparently to first start with LTPS LCD and only in 2014 start producing AMOLED panels as well.