September 2012

Universal Display announced that it has contracted Duksan Hi-Metal to produce OLED host materials in Korea. The two companies have entered into a "master services agreement". The first initiative under the new agreement is to provide manufacturing services for "one of Universal Display’s host products for certain Korean customers". This is most likely a green host material for Samsung Display.

Samsung is already using UDC's green emitter and host materials in some OLED displays (the PSP Vita and the Motorola Droid RAZR smartphones) and is set to start using it in more products in the future with an aim to reduce the power consumption of its OLED displays. Having a green host manufacturer in Korea will enable UDC to lower the price of its material, and it's always good to have a 2nd supplier (all of UDC materials are currently produced by PPG Industries).

According to Sony's home-entertainment product chief, Masashi Imamura, the OLED collaboration with Panasonic is "running smoothly". The two companies may offer OLED TV products after March 2014.

Sony OLED TV prototype

Sony and Panasonic announced their OLED technology partnership in June 2012 - saying that the two companies will jointly develop printing based technologies for OLED TV mass production. According to the original plans, the technology will be "established during 2013", but obviously setting up a mass production facility will also take time.

LG Group's Chairman Koo Bon-moo has decided that the company needs to fundamentally change the way it works. LG will implement a new company culture and will better judge its affiliate companies performance. Koo ban-moo also said that LG will devote its main resources to develop OLED TVs and displays - which he considers to be one of its future growth engines.

LG is set to release its first OLED TV, the 55" (the 55EM9600) in early 2013. The company is also planning to start mass producing plastic-based flexible OLED panels by the end of 2013.

Digitimes reports that AUO has started to develop a printing process to make OLED panels, with hopes that this new process will lower the production cost and increase the material utilization. AUO is suffering from low (50%) yields in its current production process - which uses vapor deposition. The report suggests that AUO is also developing Oxide-TFT backplanes for OLEDs - but this isn't news - AUO unveiled an Oxide-TFT based 32" OLED TV prototype back in November 2011.

Actually all OLED makers are looking into more efficient production processes based on printing so this is hardly a surprise. It's likely that it will take some years before we'll start seeing printed OLED panels on the market though.

LG Display filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics over OLED technology. LG Display says that Samsung infringed upon seven of its OLED patents - which relate to the design of the OLED panel, the driver circuitry and device design. LG seeks damages - and also a permanent injunction against the sale of Samsung's Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Tab 7.7 in South Korea.

In response, Samsung said that it actually has more OLED patents than LG and it is yet to review the lawsuit and consider its legal actions. Earlier this month Samsung Display filed a lawsuit against LG over OLED technology tech leak. Samsung claims that LG Display stole 18 confidential technologies relating to OLED displays, and also gave some of the information to a third party. Samsung also reported that two of its OLED TVs were 'lost' during the shipment to the IFA exhibition, and this may be another case of industry espionage.

Samsung has been promising flexible OLED displays in 2012, but a new report suggests that the company had to delay mass production of flexible OLEDs due to technical issues. Specifically, it seems that Samsung is struggling with the low yields in their LITI process. According to the report, they are attempting a hybrid patterning process - FMM for blue sub-pixels and LITI for the red and green ones.

On a positive note, the report says that it's possible that Samsung will overcome the technical issues fast enough to introduce a first device (smartphone?) in the first half of 2013. Back in April Samsung announced that it will brand its flexible OLEDs as YOUM displays. As we said before, the plan was to release these OLEDs in 2012.

Samsung announced today that the Galaxy Note 2 has launched in South Korea. It will soon launch worldwide in 128 countries via 260 mobile carriers. The Note II is the successor to the popular "Phablet" Galaxy Note. This large phone/tablet has a 5.5" HD Super AMOLED display (1280x720, non-Pentile), a quad-core 1.6Ghz processor and a large 3,100mAh battery. The Note II is only 9.4mm thick.

The Note 2 uses a unique RGB sub-pixel scheme (@267 PPI) - not Pentile, but also not a classic RGB strip. It may be that the Note 2 uses Ignis' AdMo-p technology.

Update: I just talked to DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira, and he says that the power-consumption test was done on an all-white screen. This is the worst-case scenario for an OLED, and so real-world results will be better (depending on your typical phone usage of course). 

DisplayMate posted an interesting and comprehensive comparison between the iphone 5 IPS-LCD and the Super AMOLED HD display used in the Galaxy S3. They say that the iPhone's display is superior - its a very accurate display, and it's the best Smartphone display they have ever seen. It's actually quite an improvement over the display used in the iPhone 4S.

DisplayMate says that the OLED display on the S3 is not as bright as the LCD, it is less readable in high ambient lighting, it has saturated green and distorted and exaggerated colors. They still complain about Samsung not calibrating the color gamut. On the other hand, they say that OLED is a new technology and hasn't been refined to the same degree as LCDs yet. They still say OLEDs have a very promising future.

Beneq announced that a leading Asian customer has ordered a large-area batch atomic layer deposition (ALD) coating system. This system will be used to develop flexible OLED products. Beneq's batch ALD systems offer a unique combination of excellent thin-film quality, high-throughput and large-area processing capabilities, enabling scale-up of demanding thin-film processes.

Asian OLED makers are getting ready to start producing flexible OLEDs. Last month we heard that Aixtron delivered a production-scale PRODOS Gen-3.5 Polymer Vapor Phase Deposition (PVPD) system to a "major prestigious Asian customer" (probably Samsung or LG) that plans to use it to produce novel flexible electronic devices. We know that Samsung plans to release their first plastic-based flexible OLED panels by the end of 2012 while LG plans to start mass production of flexible OLEDs in the second half of 2013.

BLU's Vivo 4.3 is now shipping unlocked in the US for $269. The Vivo 4.3 is a Dual-SIM smartphone (Android v4.0) with a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display, a 1Ghz dual-core CPU, 4GB memory (and a microSD slot) and a 8mp camera.