May 2016

China-based Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund (FGC) offered to buy Aixtron for €670 million ($750 million). The German production equipment maker agreed to the offer - but it still requires shareholder and regulatory approval.

Aixtron is offering OVPD deposition equipment (developed originally by Universal Display, and licensed exclusively to Aixtron) that, according to the company, offers an optimized and efficient deposition with very short cycle times compared to conventional VTE systems - which should lead to drastically reduced OLED production costs. Recently Aixtron announced that it's new Gen-8.5 OVPD demonstrator system is now available for initial customer tests.

The 2016 SID DisplayWeek conference that took place last week in San Francisco was an impressive trade show. We are now on the way back home but couldn't wait to share some of our thoughts. We will post several in-depth stories from DisplayWeek, but here are our first impressions.

It is clear that OLED technology has graduated into a more mature technology, and almost all display makers (including Samsung, LG, Tianma and BOE) that presented at SID demonstrated some OLED displays. The most impressive display, in our opinion, was LG's 77" 4K HDR OLED TV. The image quality was simply superb! It seems that most people we talked to agree on that point - and indeed the LG TV won the best-of-show award.

Kateeva announced that it has closed its Series-E funding round - with $88 million in new financing. The new investors (all from China) include BOE Display, TCL Capital. Kateeva raised over $200 million in total, and previous investors include Samsung Ventures and Veeco.

Kateeva is developing and producing ink-jet systems for OLED production. Originally the systems were intended for OLED stack material deposition, but in 2014 the company also started to offer ink-jet based encapsulation systems - used to protect flexible OLED displays.

Analyst firm IDTechEx has just released their new market forecasts for OLED displays. IDTechEx expects the market will reach nearly $1.6 billion this year and will grow to $57 billion in 2026.

For the last two years, the company has correctly predicted that plastic OLED and flexible OLED would be the major trend in displays. In the latest report, IDTechEx has revised their market forecast upwards based on the planned increase in production capacity.

GJM developed a new 300mm roll-to-roll deposition system that can directly deposit both organic and inorganic materials on plastic materials - and be used to mass produce flexible OLEDs. The system was developed in collaboration with the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials.

GJM says that its R2R system can speed up production times compared to current systems - by about 50% (GJM says that production amount can be improved by 1.5 times) - and so contribute to lower cost production. The system can be used to produce both OLED display and lighting panels.

Samsung Display announced its 55" mirror transparent OLED displays back in June 2015, and later announced that it will start shipping those displays in Q2 2016. True to its word, SDC today announced the first commercial installation in a hair salon in Seoul - although shipments to other customers will only begin in Q3 2016.

The Leekaja Hairbis installed several such displays (I counted at least 7 in the pictures Samsung provided) - and each is placed in front of clients that can consult different styles and colors and also check out the latest trends - straight from the mirror display.

Japan's Dai Nippon Printing, the world's leader in evaporation mask (FMM) production, announced it will invest $54.6 million to triple its evaporation mask production capacity so it could meet the demand of the expanding OLED market.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, DNP's market share in the evaporation mask market is over 50%. The company's expansion will be made in several stages, but should complete by 2020. DNP aims to reach $272 million in annual sales in 2020 (triple its current sales).

China's Skyworth recently launched its new OLED TVs for 2016 - both with 4K resolution and support for HDR. In 2015 the company was optimistic about its OLED TVs - and said aims to sell 30,000 OLED TVs by the end of March 2016 (the company's FY2015) - and 200,000 OLED TVs by the end of March 2017.

Skyworth's main problem with those OLEDs was that LG Display cannot supply them with enough panels, especially the 65" ones. According to report from China, though, Skyworth is way behind its OLED goals.

Hong Kong-based Truly Semiconductors started working on an AMOLED fab in 2014, and in May 2015 estimated that production will begin in Q1 2016. According to the OLED Association, Truly is facing a slight delay, but backplane production will begin next month, and full OLED display production will commence in September.

Truly's fab is a 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab that will have a capacity of 15,000 substrates per month (although this could be expanded to 30,000).

The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) demonstrated its printed electronics technologies, and the following video explains the technologies behind these new innovations:

The video shows the CPI's flexible OLED lighting prototypes, and Polyphotonx's OLED sleep mask.