UBI says that in Q3 2016, shipments of AMOLED panels for smartphones reached 96 million. This is an increase of 148% over Q3 2015 and a 103% increase over Q2 2016.
UBI sees AMOLED shipments increasing in a CAGR of 41% from 2016 to 2020, to reach 1.4 billion units in 2020. Flexible OLEDs will amount to about 60% of all AMOLED shipped by 2020.
UBI Research predicts that OLED TVs produced using a solution-based process will start to appear in the market in 2019. Evaporation-processed WOLED TVs will still be the market leader with a 85% market share (of the total OLED TVs) in 2021.
Solution-based OLED emitters are not as efficient or long-lasting as evaporation OLEDs, but ink-jet printing will enable to reduce costs compared to evaporation, and for OLED TVs this can make business sense, especially as a WOLED (WRGB) structure is less efficient than a direct-emission RGB architecture. UBI sees solution-based OLEDs competing with WRGB OLEDs for the mid-range TV market, not the premium one.
According to reports from China, several mobile phone makers, including Huawei, Oppo and Vivo (BKK) are worried about the tight AMOLED supply, especially as Apple's appetite for AMOLED displays may end up taking up all existing and future capacity in the near future.
The reports suggest that the three phone makers are discussing the forming of a new alliance that will secure AMOLED supply. The alliance will make investment into flexible OLED production by Chinese display makers, and secure capacity - in a similar fashion to what Apple is doing with Samsung and has done before with LCD makers.
Nanoco, a UK-based cadmium-free quantum-dot developer, announced that it acquired a group of QD patents from Kodak. These patents are connected to the use of quantum dots in Q-LED displays.
Q-LED displays are emissive displays, similar to OLEDs, but ones that use QDs as the emitting materials. These displays make use of the dots electroluminescent, as opposed to current QD-LCD displays that use the dots photoluminescent to enhance the color gamut and efficiency of LED-based LCDs.
Hong Kong-based Truly Semiconductors started working on its AMOLED fab in 2014, and in May 2015 estimated that production will begin in Q1 2016. The fab was delayed, and a few months later it was estimated that production will begin in September 2016.
Truly have finally announced that the fab is now online, and the company is starting AMOLED mass production. Truly published the (rather overdone and weird) video you see above - and according to the video the company is targeting smartphones, wearables, VR and automotive applications.
In March 2016 the EU launched a new project, called, PI-SCALE, that aims to create a European-wide pilot line which will enable companies of all sizes to quickly and cost effectively test and scale up their flexible OLED lighting concepts and turn them into market ready products.
As one of the core-founders in this project, the Fraunhofer FEP is soon set to present the first demonstrators of flexible OLED out from this project. The OLED prototype you see above was deposited using a roll-to-roll by Nippon Electric Glass, on an ultra-thin glass.
A few days ago we reported that BOE Display started to supply OLED TV panels to Skyworth. Today we have this photo you see below, showing the new 55" UHD (4K) panels. The new panels were produced at BOE's 8.5-Gen pilot line in Hefei.
Skyworth is currently using LGD WOLED panels for its OLED TVs, and in December 2015 the company launched its latest OLED and OLED HDR TVs . Skyworth hopes to sell 200,000 OLED TVs by the end of March 2017. Skyworth said its main problem with those OLEDs is that LG Display cannot supply them with enough panels, especially the 65" ones - so now it seems Skyworth found its answer with BOE Display.
Reserachers from Korea's KAIST institute developed a process to deposit OLED displays on textile substrates. The substrate uses fabrics made from several-micrometer-thick fibers. Using a planarization process the researchers created a fabric as flat as a piece of glass.
The OLED was deposited on this flat fabric using regular evaporation equipment. Using thin-film encapsulation, a lifetime of 1,000 hours was achieved. The textile OLED is much more flexible than a plasic based one, and may find uses in wearables. Of course the performance needs to be increased and this just a research project at this stage.
Researchers from the Holst Centre developed a new process to deposit semiconductor layers with better performance and high throughput than PVD-based process. the new process is based on scalable, atmospheric-pressure process spatial-ALD.
The Holst Centre used sALD to deposit IGZO backplanes that achieved charge carrier mobilities of 30 to 45 cm2/Vs. The researchers say that similar backplanes deposited with PVD (supttering) achieve about 10 cm2/Vs. The sALD layers also exhibited low off current, switch-on voltages around 0 V and excellent bias stress stability.
Yole Developpement released a new report covering the OTFT market for flexible displays and other applications. According to Yole, some display makers in Taiwan and China are currently in the process of industrializing OTFT-based displays - flexible LCDs at first, with flexible OLEDs coming within 2-3 years.
The mobility of OTFTs are already high enough for LCDs (higher than a-Si) - but still not enough for OLEDs. But in 2-3 years this should be resolved, with low-performance (200 PPI) OLED displays for wearables, some consumer applications and embedded automotive OLEDs possible within 2-3 years.
