January 2017

Last week we reported that Japan Display is developing flexible LCD displays. The company demonstrated a 5.5" FHD LCD that it brands as FULL ACTIVE FLEX, aiming to mass produced such displays that compete with flexible OLEDs in 2018.

JDI posted a presentation detailing the company's strategy, in which they showed the video you see above. This shows how flexible the display is - but it also shows that the LED backlighting unit is not flexible which seems to be a major flaw - I'm guessing JDI will want to change that, otherwise there's not much point in a flexible LCD...

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Konica Minolta and Pioneer are in talks to merge their OLED lighting business. According to the report, the two companies are finalizing the agreement, and will setup a new 50:50 joint venture in the spring.

Both companies are producing OLEDs, and the two production facilities will still be owned by the parent companies - but the OLED R&D and sales operations and will be spun-off to a new company.

The OLED display market is now an established market with over $10 billion in annual revenue. OLEDs are mostly used in mobile devices - over 300 million AMOLED panels were produced in 2016, most of them used in smartphones. OLED panels are also used in TVs, tablets, smartwatches, laptops and VR headsets.

Back in 2001, eMagin started offering OLED microdisplays, which are tiny displays fabricated directly on the silicon control circuitry (on the CMOS). Since 2001, the OLED microdisplay market is growing slowly and these high-end microdisplays are mostly used in defense, medical and industrial applications due to their high cost. Many high-end digital cameras also use OLED microdisplays for their electronic viewfinder (EVF).

Novaled has started constructing its new 20 million Euro fab and office buildings. The new facility will be located in the north of Dresden, and will comprise of a renovated old mill that will be turned into a prestigious office building and a new 110-meter long R&D plant with state-of-the-art research areas, laboratories and clean rooms.

Novaled says it is the world's only supplier of organic dopants for mass produced OLED displays - and also in OLED lighting panels. Novaled's materials are also used in OPV devices.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) announced new SBIR and STTR grants for solid state lighting projects. The DoE announced five new grants out of which two are related to OLED technologies.

Pixelligent Technologies were awarded an SBIR project titled "Light Extraction for OLED Lighting with 3-D Gradient Index". This project will explore the application of a novel and unique 3D gradient index (GRIN) layer to improve the efficiency and lifetime of OLED devices. Using such a unique structure, OLEDs could be produced that achieve the theoretical maximum extraction efficiency.

Digital Trends posted this nice video showing LG's OLED technologies demonstrated a few weeks ago at CES 2017.

The video shows a commercial display built from tiled curved 77" OLED panels, LG's new Crystal Sound OLEDs which turn the slightly flexible OLED TV screen into speaker and a 55" transparent OLED (which has been demonstrated before).

Japan Display announced that it is developing flexible LCD displays. JDI demonstrated a 5.5" FHD (401PPI) LCD that it brands as FULL ACTIVE FLEX. This display uses a plastic substrate which makes the display flexible and also very durable. JDI says it plans to start mass producing such displays in 2018.

The 5.5" FHD display's normal refresh rate is 60Hz, but it can be driven at 15Hz which significantly reduces the power consumption. The brightness of the display is 500 cd/m² and the contrast ratio is 1500:1.

CSEM and Sefar developed low cost flexible, transparent, highly conductive electrodes made of fabric substrates comprising flexible metallic wires and polymeric fibers woven together in a highly transparent and flexible polymer. CSEM and Sefar produced an OLED lighting prototype that uses a backplane based on these new electrodes.

Sefar calls this new backplane a fabric SEFAR TCS Planar backplane. These backplanes are manufactured using low-cost, high-throughput processes under standard ambient clean room conditions. The OLED lighting device prototype was deposited using a coating technology and is made from polymer solution materials.

JOLED (Japan OLED) was established in August 2014 by Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic with an aim to become an OLED medium display (10-30 inch) producer. JOLED is using a printing process which should result in lower cost production (but of lower performance displays) compared to evaporation printing.

JOLED's R&D Division Manager spoke at the PF&E China conference a couple of weeks ago, detailing the company's process. JOLED is producing RGB-strip OLED panels using ink-jet printers made by Panasonic and PLED materials produced by Sumitomo. The OLED structure is based on Sony's technology and the backplane is a transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor.

LG lowered the price of its high-end 2016 OLEDE6 OLED TVs - the 55" model costs $2,499 while the 65" model costs $3,999. That's about $1,000 lower than the price before. LG may be starting to lower the price of its 2016 models as it gets ready to release its newer 2017 OLED TVs.

LG's OLEDE6 is a series of flat-panel 4K smart OLED TVs introduced in 2016. The TVs feature an ultra-slim on-glass design, a fixed soundbar, LG's webOS 3.0, Color Prime PRO technology and HDR.