Ason Technology was established in 2006 in Japan to develop OLED lighting technologies. The company finally unveiled their first OLED lighting panel during the FPD International 2013 exhibition last month.

Ason's panel use Multi-Photo-Emission (MPE), which is a stacked emitter architecture, which is also used by Lumiotec. Usually MPE panels use about 3 layers, but Ason managed to stack 10 or more emitting layers which enables them to reach a very high brightness and CRI. Ason also developed their own diffusion reflection layer so that the emitted color does not change even when viewed from different angles.

eMagin reported their financial results for Q3 2013. Revenues were $6.3 million (down from $7.5 in Q3 2012). Net less (pre-tax) was $1 million. The company has no debt and about $13.1 million in cash.

eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

The SNU deposition tool still has issues. During October they had a vacuum leak which required a new part. Now the company expects yield improvement. In fact, just a few days ago (November 11) they ran a significant number of wafers through the tool and it is outpacing the old Satella and eMagin's plan.

Researchers from the Fraunhofer IAP insitute, together with MBraun, developed a new production facility that can be used to print OLED panels and OPV cells. They say that the new system can be used to produce large sample panels. The Fraunhofer showed the "bus stop of the future" that includes both large OPVs and OLED displays:

The Fraunhofer released very little technical details. I think this process actually produces very large OLED (or OPV) pixels , so you can think of these as OLED lighting panels and not really displays. The researchers said that the system includes a robot that controls different printers - and this all is like a "huge" ink-jet printer.

Researchers from Oxford University are developing a visual-aid glasses that can enhance vision for visually-impaired people. The basic idea is that the glasses include depth cameras (using Kinect hardware) and transparent displays that show the same image you're looking at - only brighter for the visually impaired.

The first versions used a LED array, but now they are developing glasses that use transparent OLED panels. If you want more information, you can view the 25 minute presentation below.

Last month Samsung announced that the Novaled acquisition for €260 million (almost $350 million) is complete. Samsung Cheil Industries now owns 50% of Novaled and the company said they will focus entirely on electronic components and materials.

Now Korea's Yonhap News reports that Cheil plans to spend 1.8 trillion Won (almost $1.7 billion) over the next three years in on OLED and display materials and films. The company hopes to reach about 100 billion Won ($93 million) in OLED revenues in 2014. Cheil recently sold its fashion business unit to Samsung Everland for a trillion Won (almost a billion US dollars).

LG is set to launch the G Flex today in Korea (for about $940), they have released a short video teaser in Korean:

Back in February, LG Chem, LG Electronics and Designboom teamed up for a new OLED lighting design competition. There were two categories, regular (rigid) panels and flexible ones. A few months ago Designboom announced the winners - but I only found about that today. Some beautiful designs were submitted...

The lamp above is the lambda by H. Gerlach. It won the first place (and $5,000) in the flexible OLED category. LG says that this design exemplifies the visual characteristics of OLED panels, especially the flexible ones, and it is easily transitionable to mass production.

A few days ago Samsung held their Analyst Day 2013 with a lot of fascinating information regarding the company's present business and its future plans. It was clear from Samsung Display's presentation that the company sees OLED as the leading future display technology and puts a great emphasis on flexible displays. They see flexible OLED penetration into the mobile display market reaching 40% by 2018 (up from 0.2% in 2013) - this is based on research by DisplaySearch.

In fact Samsung Electronics's CEO announced that the company aims to bring fully-foldable screens sometimes in 2015. In the same statement he mentioned that there is still plenty of room for improvement for the Galaxy Gear and it's likely that the company is already developing a wearable device with a flexible AMOLED display.

Researchers from South Korea's Gyeongsang National University and Chung Ang University developed a new plastic (polymer) semiconductor backplane technology. The new backplane features a carrier mobility of 12 cm²/Vs - which is good enough for AMOLED displays, and the best mobility of any polymer based backplane according to the researchers.

Flexible AMOLED prototype, AUO

The researchers say that this new backplane can be used in flexible, bendable and stretchable displays. It should be cost effective, too, as it is based on poylmers and not silicon or oxide TFTs.

LG is set to launch the G Flex tomorrow in Korea (for about $940), and according to this new video, the device actually flexes a little (you have to apply some force, though):

The G Flex has a 6" 720p RGB flexible OLED display made by LG Display. We know it is based on a plastic substrate, but it isn't known when it is covered in plastic or in a curved glass (like Samsung's Galaxy Round). If it flexes it makes sense this is an all-plastic device. But then it should have been "unbreakable" too, but LG never mentioned this in any PR so it is strange.