Wisechip announced that next week it will demonstrate its new flexible and transparent PMOLED panels, at a tradeshow in Taiwan. The company says it has achieved a breakthrough in transparent OLED production, and mass production will begin by the end of 2016.

Wisechip did not reveal any details about these upcoming panels, only saying that the panels will feature "good transparency". Wisechip will also demonstrate flexible PMOLEDs with a bending radius of 60 to 40 mm.

In early 2016 UBI Research estimated that LG Display will produce 1.2 million OLED TV panels in 2016, and 8.1 million in 2020. But now UBI Research reduced those estimates by around 20-30% to 800,000-900,000 panels in 2016 and about 6 million in 2020.

The reason for this reduction is the fact that LG Display is producing more 65" panels then estimated. We have heard this several times before - LGD sees larger than expected demand for 65" OLED TVs, and is producing more larger panels as a result. Because the company's total area production capacity is limited, this means that the total amount of produced panel is lower

Reports from China suggest that LG Display is considering changing the basic structure of its white OLED panels (WOLED) used in LGD's OLED TVs. LGD is currently using yellow and blue OLED materials to create a white OLED, but now LGD may switch to an RGB based mix.

It's not clear from the Chinese reports (which are unverified yet, of course) - but it's likely that LGD will not switch to a direct-emission RGB structure, but rather use the RGB materials to create a white OLED and remain with a color-filter based design. Switching from Y/W to R/G/B may enable LGD to achieve higher color purity - and so a larger color gamut, and may also be more efficient.

Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) announced it will actively support the development of flexible AMOLED and PMOLED technologies in Taiwan, in a bid to boost Taiwanese display makers. According to the report Taiwan will invest NT$100 billion - about $3.2 billion USD, although this kind of investment seems unlikely.

The Taiwanese government will channel most of the investments through ITRI with an aim to vertically integrate the flexible OLED supply chain and get the Taiwanese makers to co-develop OLED materials, equipment and panels. Just a couple of months ago ITRI announced it developed a foldable AMOLED display, and the institute is also developing flexible OLED lighting technologies.

UBI Research says that 4" to 6" AMOLED panels shipments will reach 318.8 million in 2016 - up 27% compared to 2015. The fast growth will continue to reach 505 million in 2017, 902 million in 2018, 1.17 billion 2019 and over 1.35 billion in 2020.

Flexible OLEDs will lead this growth as the new displays will be increasingly adopted by display makers globally. In 2016, flexible OLEDs will amount to 22% of the OLED market, but this will grow to 56 in 2018.

LG Display announced its entry to the flexible OLED automotive market back in July 2014 - and in January 2016 LGD unveiled its 12.3" Full-HD flexible OLED panels for the automotive market. LGD is already reportedly working with Tesla and Mercedes.

Cadillac now announced that it is set to unveil a new design concept, and this car adopts at least three flexible OLED displays - that Cadillac "co-developed" with LG Display. One screen shows the instrument cluster behind the wheel, and it has two curved OLED panels - one on each side that act as "overflow" with information and animations able to transition across all three of the screens.

RitDisplay's president and CEO, D.C. Wang, sees growth ahead in the PMOLED market. RitDisplay expects revenues to grow more than 20% in the second half of 2016, up from almost $32 in the first half.

In order to meet the expected demand (mostly from wearable devices, it seems), RiTDisplays aims to grow its capacity by 20 to 40 percent in 2017. Earlier reports suggested that the capacity increase will come from more efficient production ("deleting bottlenecks") - not from new equipment.

Apple's move to adopt OLED displays in its future iPhone devices has been reported so many times, that analysts assume that this is highly likely to happen in 2017 or 2018. It seems that now they are starting to look further down the road, and respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI expects Apple to adopt flexible AMOLED Panels in its 2018 iPads.

Back in 2015 it was reported that Apple wants to use OLEDs in future iPads - and that the company contracted JOLED to produce those OLEDs. That 2015 report was probably groundless, but it seems plausible that if Apple moves to flexible OLEDs, it will eventually want to adopt these displays across its entire mobile product line. Whether there's anything behind this latest estimation from KGI, I do not know.

US-based high-index material maker Pixelligent Technologies announced that it closed a $10.4 million financing round. To date Pixelligent raised over $36 million, and the new funds will be used to install additional manufacturing capacity, open new offices in Asia, and continue its R&D to develop materials for lighting, display and optical applications.

Pixelligent has been researching light extraction materials for OLED lighting panels for a long time, and in August 2015 the company officially launched its PixClear family of light extraction materials for OLED lighting panels. Pixelligent has been awarded several OLED projects by the US DoE and is collaborating with OLEDWorks and the ORNL.

Last week we reported about a new large-scale computer-driven material screening process that was developed by Researchers from Harvard University, MIT and Samsung.

The so-called Molecular Space Shuttle system combines theoretical and experimental chemistry, machine learning and cheminformatics, with an aim to quickly identify new OLED molecules (the system was already used to deisgn more than a 1,000 new high-performance blue-light emitting molecules). Today Kyulux announced that it secured a license to Harvard University’s Molecular Space Shuttle deep learning system.