eMagin, the OLED microdisplay maker, reported their financial results for Q1 2015 - the company generated $6 million in revenue (down from $6.3 from last year) and with higher gross margin and lower expenses, they managed to turn a profit of $300K - after seven quarters of operating losses.

eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

eMagin started to ship their ultra high brightness WUXGA displays, and also started to ship VGA displays globally (these are eMagin's lowest cost displays ever). eMagin also reports advances in direct-patterned OLEDs, and they completed development of its recently announced microdisplay-based HMD and demonstrated it to potential customers.

A few weeks ago I had the good chance of visiting OTMTech, an Israeli company that developed a very interesting and promising new product - the world's first unrestricted, high resolution, write-virtually anywhere mobile input device. Which basically means a small pen you can use to write on any surface and transmit the information to your mobile device.

I tried a prototype myself, and this pen actually works very well. The company is now attempting to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter, and today they launched their campaign. Good luck guys!

A few days ago, the US Energy Department (DoE) announced its tenth round of efficient SSL lighting awards, awarding more than $8.2 million to nine projects. Today the DoE released more details about the projects it awarded in this round. There are four OLED projects, awarded a total of $3.8 million.

Acuity Brands received $455,131 to develop an OLED Luminaire with integrated DC current drivers in each panel and advanced controls. The goal is to demonstrate a luminaire with an efficacy of 65 lm/W and a luminous output of 4,000 lumens.

Solomon Systech, a fabless display driver IC producer, announced their entry into the OLED lighting market with the SSD2355, which is the world's first single-chip OLED lighting driver. The SSD2355 can drive several OLED lighting panels simultaneously.

The cost-effective (4 pcs of magnetic components only) driver supports multiple-phase buck driving , a dynamic output current of 5uA to 1.2A, a wide dimming depth of 18bit, programmable gamma setting (enables smooth brightness transition), a large variety of digital control interfaces (DC, PWM, I2C and DMX512) and a flicker-free independent output PWM frequency of 4kHz.

In April 2014 Taiwan's ITRI Institute developed a new technology that enables OLED lighting panels to be patterned with static grayscale images. The new technology is called Image Lighting and it be easily be fitted into a normal OLED production process.

Today ITRI sent us an update on that project. The researchers have been upgrading the process, and have now demonstrated a new panel prototype (which you can see above), that is 10x10 cm in size and has 220 grayscale levels (up from 200 a year ago).

DisplaySearch estimates the worldwide smartwatch display market at $204 million in Q1 2015. The leading provider was LG Display - with over 90% of the market ($186 million). Other leading players are SDC (3.1%), Japan Display (2.4%) and Futaba (2.4%).

LG Display's lead is not surprising - the company is providing the flexible plastic-based OLED displays used in Apple's watch - and reportedly produced over 6 million panels for Apple, at $20 each. LG is also providing panels for LG Electronic's smart watches (including the G Watch R and the Watch Urbane). In Q4 2014, by the way, LGD only produced 1.1 million displays - impressive growth in just one quarter, attributed mostly to the Apple supply deal.

LG's premium Watch Urbane smartwatch is now shipping in the US for $350. LG's watch is a luxury-version of its Android Wear smartwatch, that comes in a metal body in gold or silver finishes and a leather strap. It uses the same 1.3" 320x320 plastic-based flexible OLED display used in the G Watch R, and the same hardware (1.2 Ghz Snapdragon 400 CPU, 512MB of RAM, 410mAh battery and 4GB of storage).

In August 2011 Samsung signed a long-term license agreement with Universal Display. This agreement (which runs till 2017, and will probably be extended) included a license fee and allowed Samsung to acquire and use UDC's patented phosphorescent OLED materials.

In total, Samsung is set to pay (and already paid) UDC hundreds of million of dollars in royalties and materials. This got me wondering - why didn't Samsung acquire UDC back then, which would have given them a lock on the OLED market? Let's look at the numbers, but the answer is probably not related to the financials, really.

BOE Display is starting to build its Gen-6 LTPS LCD/AMOLED production line in Chengdu, China. The company held the groundbreaking ceremony yesterday for this project - in which the total investment is estimated at $3.54 billion.

The fab, which is scheduled for production in H1 2017, will produce high-end small-sized mobile displays, and will have a capacity of 45,000 substrates per month. It's not clear what will be the ratio between the OLED and LCD production at the fab.

Henkel says that they conducted an analysis of the lighting market in 2025, and following this research they see OLED lighting as a "specific area of focus extending beyond traditional LEDs" - especially, it seems, flexible OLEDs.

Back in 2014, Henkel signed a joint-development agreement with Vitriflex, a US start-up that has developed a patented cost-efficient process for high-volume flexible encapsulation film production.