According to Digitimes, AUO managed to achieve 50% yield in its AMOLED fab, and is set to start mass production - on track with AUO's plans to start AMOLED mass production in Q3 2012 (but a delay from the original plan). AUO will make 4.3" qHD panels (257 ppi). AUO is co-developing in-cell touch AMOLED panels together with some handset makers (some suggest the main customer for AUO's OLEDs is HTC).

AUO's current capacity is about 7,000 monthly substrates in their Gen-3.5 fab. Later on the company plans to bring their Gen-4.5 fab in Singapore (at AFPD) online with a monthly capacity of 15,000 substrates.

Samsung announced that it has sold over 20 million Galaxy S3 phones - in just 100 days. The S3 is the fastest-selling Samsung smartphone ever. Just for comparison, the Galaxy S2 took 10 months to get to 20 million units - or about 300 days.

The S3 has a 4.8" 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED (with Pentile), a quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU (1.5Ghz dual core in the US), 1GB of RAM (2GB in the US) and an 8 mp camera (1080p video) and lot's of new software features. The phone weighs 133 grams and is only 8.6 mm thick.

Samsung Display filed a lawsuit against LG Display over OLED technology tech leak. Samsung Display claims that LG Display stole 18 confidential technologies relating to OLED displays, demanding a billion won (almost $900,000) for each technology. Samsung also said that LG Display gave some information to a third party.

In July we reported that 11 former and current Samsung employees were charged of giving LG Display confidential OLED technology, and this is Samsung's reaction in court. Actually, it seems strange that Samsung is only seeking about $17 million dollar in damages - this seems to be a very small amount when you consider that the OLED display market is now estimated to be about $6 billion, and is set to grow to about $44 billion by 2019.

When Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 2, with its 5.5" 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED display, I assumed it was a Pentile display. But it seems that the Note 2 actually uses an RGB matrix in a unique arrangement (see the photo below). Samsung calls this new matrix S-Stripe. This is rather confusing on several accounts - mostly because up till now Samsung used the brand Super AMOLED Plus for non-pentile OLEDs.

Just a few weeks ago we explained that Pentile OLED displays enable higher lifetime, and we were told that for an RGB OLED with over 230 PPI, lifetime becomes too low for Samsung and they choose Pentile in those displays. But the Note II has a PPI of 267 - the highest PPI non-Pentile OLED. This means it has a lower lifetime compared to a Pentile display (but the advantage is that there's no visible Pentile pattern of course).

A New report from digitimes says that LG Display is delaying their OLED TV production to 2013. The company originally intended to launch the OLED TVs in time for the Olympic games in London (August 2012) - but they failed to do so. LG's 55" OLED TV (the 55EM9600) is expected to cost about $10,000. 

Samsung is still on track to start producing its own OLED TVs in Q4 2012. If they'll manage to do it, they'll have a head start on LG, but expected volume will be very low in either case. Samsung's TVs are also expected to be more expensive than LG's TVs.

The FC Bayern Fan world exhibition showcases the football club's 112-year history, and now OSRAM has equipped it with new LED and OLED based lamps. In fact OSRAM have designed the "as above so below" pendant luminaire (shown below) especially for this exhibition.

The Holst Centre and Rolic Technology have entered into a research partnership on protective moisture barriers for flexible electronics applications such as OLED and OPV. Rolic will develop new materials that will enable commercialization of of high-end flexible barriers and solutions for improved light out-coupling.

The Holst Centre aims to develop this thin film barrier fabrication technology for sheet-to-sheet (S2S) application as well as roll-to-roll (R2R). The focus of this projects seems to be OLED lighting, but this will also apply to OLED displays and OPV panels. In the photo above (sent by the Holst Centre) you can see an OLED panel with black spot defects (left), and the same panel, protected by a thin film barrier, without defects. The panels themselves are Philips Lumiblade OLED lighting panels, made on rigid glass.

Samsung said that they have lost two OLED TV sets during their shipment to the IFA 2012 show in Germany last week. The company filed an official complaint to the German police. Samsung wouldn't comment further, but it may be that this is a case of industrial espionage. After all just two months ago 11 people were charged of stealing OLED TV technology from Samsung to LG Display, and a month earlier the Korean police started investigating another case of OLED technology leakage - this time by Israeli company Orbotech's local Korean branch.

Samsung had a large presence at IFA, with plenty of OLED TVs at their booth, so the missing two units didn't do much harm on the tradeshow itself. The company plans to start mass producing those TVs in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Google filed an interesting patent in 2012, in which they suggest to reduce the image on a screen when the device is idle. The idea is that when the user is not active, the display size is slowly reduced, until it is invisible. The patent specifically says that this is useful on OLED displays - as it would save power and still present a somewhat useful image to the user.

Samsung Electronics president says that Samsung aims to start mass producing 55" OLED TV panels in the fourth quarter of 2012. This is in line with earlier estimates, even though at the beginning of the year Samsung hoped to begin mass production around June or July of 2012.

Samsung does plan to continue and lead the global TV market, and they see OLED technology enabling them to making a "second leap forward". Samsung's president further revealed that he sees transparent displays as the next emerging technology following OLED. Samsung thinks that ultra-definition is not going to be so important in the near future due to the lack of content.