January 2014

In August 2013, DisplaySearch said that AMOLED technology is expected to take the revenue lead in the mobile phone display market. The company now released their new worldwide FPD shipment forecasts, and they say that actually LTPS LCD had the largest revenue share in 2013 (37%) followed closely by AMOLED (35%).

Interestingly, the company sees LTPS LCDs to grow in popularity as requirements for higher resolution and longer battery life will drive the growth. Those LTPS LCDs will grab 51% of the market by 2020. It's one of the first time I see a market research saying that AMOLED mobile phone displays wil stop growing in the future - and even decline in market share.

Truly Semiconductors (a Hong-Kong based LCD and PMOLED producer) announced that it entered into a joint venture with the Huizhou City Government to invest in a 4.5-Gen AMOLED production line. If all goes well, this fab will go into production in H2 2015 with a production capacity of 15,000 monthly substrates.

Truly now joins several other Chinese makers (including BOE, CSOT, Visionox and others) that have plans for AMOLED fabs. It seems that BOE's 5.5-Gen fab in Ordos is the most advances Chinese AMOLED fab, as the company already started constructing it and the company even considers using some of the capacity in that fab for plastic based flexible OLED production.

Before CES 2014, we heard several reports from Korea that Samsung is set to unveil AMOLED tablets at CES. Samsung ended up launching several new tablets at the event, but none with OLED displays. Now we hear fresh rumors from Korea that claim that the company will start producing 8" and 10.5" AMOLED panels in February, and they will hopefully unveil their new AMOLED tablets at the MWC 2014 event in March.

A few days ago Samsung electronics announced plans to start adopting OLEDs in more products - including in tablets. Samsung did launch an OLED tablet in 2011, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its 7.7" Super AMOLED Plus 1280x800 display. This was a premium small tablet and it was estimated that Samsung shipped only 500,000 of those OLED tablets.

Universal Display announced that Kaneka signed an OLED technology license agreement. UDC granted license rights to manufacture and sell phosphorescent OLED lighting products. Kaneka will use UDC's PHOLED materials in their OLED lighting devices.

Kaneka has been developing OLED lighting panels for a long time. The company had plans to start offering OLED panels back in 2011, and showed dimmable 20 lm/w panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). Back in 2011 the company said those panels cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and they hoped this will drop to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020.

Even though earlier rumors suggested Samsung will adopt an LCD for the upcoming GS5 phone, it was later reported that the GS5 will actually adopt a 5.2" WQHD (2560 x 1440, 560 PPI) AMOLED panel. Today, at a display technology roadmap seminar, Samsung confirmed that indeed they are developing a QHD AMOLED panel.

Samsung will not stop at 560 PPI. The company is actually planning an even higher density panel - a UHD panel that will feature 860 PPI. It will be very hard to justify such a high density on a mobile device, but I guess it's a marketing race that is hard to stop. At any case, it seems that Samsung will be adopting the Diamond Pixel architecture for those high resolution displays.

LG Electronics reported their financial results for Q4 2013 and the Korean company doubled its operating profits compared to last year. LG reports a good quarter in its TV business, but the mobile unit reported a loss (partly blamed on marketing spending) even though they sold 13.2 million phones which is 50% higher than in Q3 2012.

Regarding OLEDs, LG says that they expect the OLED TV market to pick up from 2014, "gradually becoming the main growth driver of the display business and replacing the LED TV market". The company plans to extend the distribution network and to strengthen regionally differentiated marketing activities in order to increase sales of OLED TVs in 2014.

According to ZDNet, Samsung is developing the successor to the Galaxy Gear smartwatch. The Gear 2 will feature a totally different design and use a flexible AMOLED. ZDNet says that the company will reveal the new smartwatch in London in March or April.

According to earlier reports, Samsung sold over 800,000 Galaxy Gear devices. The smartwatch is considered to be a failure by most analysts and this explains why Samsung needs to change the design drastically.

Alkilu, a new company established in 2013 to develop affordable consumer OLED lighting devices, unveiled their range of OLED products at CES 2014. And these indeed are affordable - some of those OLED lamps cost as low as $19.95.

The company's CEO, Alex Khayat, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had regarding the company and those OLED lighting devices. Alex has 25 years of technology experience, including nearly a decade of OLED industry R&D for Boston-based ieDisplay (an R&D company that sold its research to tech specific and similar companies).

According to Amazon, Samsung's latest digital camera, the NX30, will ship on February 18, and will cost $999. The NX30 is a mirrorless camera that features a 20.3 MP sensor, Wi-Fi, fast hybrid autofocusing system and a touch 3" Super AMOLED with 1.04 million pixels.

The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) developed new backplane fabrication processes to allow the bending of Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFT) arrays to small radii (1 mm) without a significant reduction in device performance. In the video below you can see a bending test of the OTFT array produced on a 50-micron thick PEN film. Those arrays can be bent up to 10,000 times.

The CPI hopes that these new processes will eventually lead to the adoption of such organic backplanes in OLED displays, and they say that the OTFTs feature a charge mobility that is "suitable" for OLED driving (although it was only 2 cm2/Vs. They have since upgraded it to 4 cm2/Vs) and they managed to fabricate display pixel-sized OTFTs.