February 2013

Eyelit, a manufacturing software provider, announced today that eMagin selected their Eyelit MES software to further optimize production efficiency at its NY manufacturing facility. Eyelit's software will help eMagin to increase manufacturing yield, reduce cycle time and ramp production.

eMagin says that Eyelit's software will help them to configure processes quickly with WIP tracking to improve visibility, and to phase in higher-level functions such as SPC and equipment management. eMagin expects to increase their production volume significantly compared to last year and efficiency is very important currently.

LG Chem, LG Electronics and Designboom teamed up for a new OLED lighting design competition. The first category will use LG Chem's standard rigid OLED panels. The winner will receive $5,000 and the runner up will receive $3000. In the second category, one can use LG Chem's flexible panels and/or transparent panels. There will be one winner in that category ($5,000).

This is not just a design competition - LG wants to find lamp designs that they can produce, and they will have the right of first refusal to the exclusive use of the designs for production. If I understand it correctly, LG will pay $10,000 for the rights to the design they want to produce.

Universal Display reported their financial results for Q4 2012. Revenues were $28.1 million and net income was $5.4 million. In 2012 the company revenues were $83.2 million, up 36% from 2011.

Samsung and LG have agreed to resolve their OLED dispute outside of the court of law, and both companies dropped their injunction lawsuits. Now we hear that the two companies may begin working-level talks to resolve their legal issues in early March. Samsung Display's Kim Ki-nam said that the two companies are considering cross-licensing patents, but it's too early to decide on that yet.

Samsung and LG have been involved in a legal battle over OLED (and other technologies) IP for almost a year now. DisplaySearch speculated that the two Korean giants may eventually collaborate on OLED technology, mostly due to fear from Japanese competition.

In the beginning of February we enabled Facebook comments on OLED-Info. A lot of people were happy about this, but we finally decided to cancel this option, and remain with our own internal commenting system, for several reasons.

Anyway. We're sorry that all the Facebook comments have now been deleted (We couldn't find an easy way to migrate them to our own system). If you want you can still reach out to us using our Facebook page of course.

Sony announced a new DLSR, the A58. This new mid-range camera sports a newly-developed 20mp sensor, new lock-on focus mode and auto-object framing mode. The EVF uses an SVGA (800x600) OLED microdisplay. The back display uses Sony's new Triluminos Quantum-Dots enhanced LCD (the first time this display is used in a consumer product, expect Sony's newest TVs). We just spotted the A58 on Amazon.co.uk - and it will launch on April 19 2013 in the UK for £500.

That SVGA OLED microdisplay is interesting. Sony themselves released 0.5" XGA (1024x768) and 0.7" 1280x720 OLED microdisplays back in August 2011 (they are using the XGA ones in several DSLRs, such as the A99 and the A65), and they never mentioned an SVGA one. We do know that both eMagin and Olightek are making SVGA microdisplays however.

Samsung has given out invitations for their new Galaxy phone (which will probably be called the S4, as you can see from the image below) launch event - on March 14th, in New York (7PM ET). Early this month it was reported that Samsung is beginning to produce the 4.99" Full-HD (440 PPI) AMOLED display that will be used in this phone. These reports come from Korea, and are apparently based on Analysts researching Samsung's supply chain companies.

However, two days ago SamMobile (a usually credible blog) posted that the S4 will in fact not use an OLED at all. They quite an "insider" claiming that the phone will use a 4.99" Full-HD SoLux LCD display. The processor will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 @1.9 Ghz - and not a Samsung-made Exynos 5 processor as was previous estimated.

We all know that LG Display managed to beat Samsung and be the first company to actually produce and ship OLED TV panels. Today the Korea Times claims that Samsung decided to adopt LG's own WRGB architecture and the company will start producing such OLED TV panels towards the end of 2013.

Samsung and LG have taken different paths towards large sized OLED panels. Samsung is using an LTPS backplane and a direct-emission (or side by side) architecture which means that there are three sub pixels for each pixel (red, green and blue). Samsung's design does not use any color filters. LG's OLED panels use an Oxide-TFT backplane and white sub pixels with color filters (this is called WRGB because there are four subpixels: red, green, blue and one white, non filtered. Is is also referred to sometimes as WOLED-CF).

The US Embassy in Helsinki is installing an Acuity Brands Trilia OLED fixture in their Innovation Center. They posted this nice photo showing the work in progress:

The Trilia is a modular lamp that uses either two kinds of models (the Tri and the Straight) to create unique network-like design. The Tri section model uses 24 OLED panels (1810 lumens) while the Straight section model uses 8 panels (603 lumens). This specific installation has 136 OLED panels altogether.

The OLED panels (produced by LG Chem) feature an efficiency of 60 lm/W, 3500K color temperature, 15,000 hours of lifetime (LT70) and a CRI of over 80.

Back in January it was reported that HTC decided to use AUO's 4.65" OLED panels in their upcoming code-named M7 flagship phone. Yet other reports suggested that AUO still faces production issues and HTC decided to use Sharp-made LCD panels instead. Today HTC unveiled the HTC One phone, and sadly it is indeed using an LCD (4.7" 1080p Super LCD 3, 468 PPI).

So it appears that AUO still hasn't started to mass produce AMOLED displays. Digitimes says that it's likely that they wouldn't be able to start real mass production until 2014, which is a real shame.