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Samsung is set to unveil its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S7 next week at the MWC 2016 trade show in Barcelona. According to our information, Samsung will unveil two phones, the S7 and S7 Edge which will sport a curved flexible OLED display.

According to reports from Korea, Samsung Display already started producing the new OLEDs, and secured the capacity to produce 9 million flexible OLEDs per month for the S7 Edge at the A2 and A3 flexible OLED lines - which means that Samsung will pretty much use all its flexible OLED capacity for the new phones.

SID's DisplayWeek is the world's leading display conference, and we have decided to attend this year's event which will take place in San Francisco in May 22-27. The trade show usually brings together a large part of the display industry, and we're looking forward to seeing new OLED technologies, products and demonstrators and meeting up with industry leaders.

DisplayWeek includes a 3-day exhibition, 4-day technical symposium, short courses, seminars and three focus conferences (business, investors and market-focus). A three-day exhibition sounds like a lot but from past experience it's hardly enough time.

Germany-based display and touch solution provider Lang AG demonstrated their latest display, a 55" transparent touch-enabled Full-HD OLED. This is the first time, I think, that a touch-enabled 55" transparent OLED was demonstrated:

Lang's transparent OLEDs are probably produced by Samsung Display, which are starting to produce 55" transparent OLEDs. LG Display also demonstrated similar panels, but it seems they are still just prototypes.

LG Electronics is set to unveil its next flagship phone, the G5, on February 21st. The company published a short teaser, saying that the new phone will have an "always on" display that shows the time and notifications:

Such an always on screens is highly suggestive of an OLED display - as an LCD will still require a lot of energy to display even a small amount of pixels because it uses a backlight. An OLED will only consume power proportional to the number of lit pixels.

Following the Superbowl ad campaign, LG announced that its flagship 2016 OLED TV, the 65" Signature OLEDG6 is now available for pre-orders in select retail stores in the US. The G6 costs $7,999 and initial shipments are planned for late March. Amazon already lists the G6, but does not specify the shipment date.

LG's Signature OLED G6 is LG's top-end TV model for 2016. The G6 feature an ultra-slim on-glass design, a high-end pivoting Harman Kardon soundbar, LG's webOS 3.0, Color Prime PRO technology and HDR. The G6 models are available in 65 and 77 inches.

A few weeks ago we posted about Merck's soluble OLED material performance, and today we have some more data from the OLED Association. In the table below you can see how Merck's, Sumitomo and DuPont's soluble materials compare to UDC's evaporable OLED's materials.

As you can see, for the red material, evaporable OLEDs have a clear lead in lifetime and efficiency. For the green material that efficiency gap has pretty much closed, while the lifetime of the evaporable materials are still about double than the best soluble materials.

A few months ago, OSRAM announced a new five-year strategic plan that includes a €2 billion investment in current and future lighting applications - which includes OLEDs for the automotive market. Last week the company's CEO, Olaf Berlien, said that while OLED is an important technology for some niches (like automotive lighting), it is "definitely" too expensive for general lighting.

Olaf says that Osram will indeed invest in OLED lighting technology, but not for general lighting. He does not expect OLEDs to be ready for the general lighting market anytime soon.

OLEDs are nowadays facing the same issues they had since the beginning: basically, OLED materials are extremely sensitive to oxidizing agents and, especially, to moisture. This requires encapsulation materials with exceptionally high barrier properties and active fillers or getters, capable of absorbing water on a single molecule basis. The optimization of many functional properties in single encapsulating materials is a very complex materials science problem. The fact that OLED materials can also be very sensitive to heat or radiations, generates many process constraints as well.

It turns out that encapsulation materials must be specifically engineered taking into account the OLED structure, the device architecture, the chemical and physical nature of the materials and, nevertheless, the specific processes to be applied.

It's been a long while since we heard of any OLED updates from Taiwan's Innolux. Innolux has been promising small scale OLED production back in 2012, but this never materialized. Now the company's president says that Innolux expects OLED demand in high-end smartphones to take off in 2017, and that Innolux continues its flexible OLED R&D.

Innolux AMOLED prototype, 2012

Earlier this month it was reported that Innolux is building a new 6-Gen LTPS line that will be used to produce both LCD and AMOLED panels. Innolux expects the new line to start producing panels in the first half of 2016. According to the latest comments from Innolux's president, it does not seem likely that Innolux is aiming to start OLED production soon.