May 2017

AUO demonstrates several OLED panels and technologies at SID 2017, and the excellent video below walks through these displays with lot's of details.

First up is AUO's foldable 5" 1280x720 (295 PPI) high color gamut (95% BT.2020) display announced last month. JJ Lih, AUO's R&D manager, says that the company expects to have this display in mass production within 2 years. The panel is only 1 mm thick and the bending (folding) radius is 4 mm.

LG Electronics just lowered the price of most of its newest OLED TVs. The price of its signature OLEDG7 TVs was slashed by $1,000 - so the price for the 65" model now costs $5,999. The price of LG's high-end OLEDE7 TVs were also reduced by $1,000 - the current prices are $3,999 for the 55" model and $4,999 for the 65" model.

The prices of LG's entry-level OLEDC7 TV were also reduced. The 55" model now costs $2,799 (down from $2,999) while the 65" one costs $3,997 (down from $4,499). It seems that the prices of LG's other OLED TVs did not change.

Samsung's latest flagship phones, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are apparently selling very well - Samsung revealed that it sold more than one million S8 in South Korea, only 37 days after the official launch - it took the Galaxy S7 74 days to achieve the same feat.

Samsung further says that global shipments exceeded 10 million units already.

Last week BOE demonstrated two Q-LED displays, 5" (320x240) and 14" (960x540). These prototype displays use electroluminesence quantum-dots as emitting materials.

According to BOE, switching to an in-organic emitter enables a display that features an excellent display quality - on part with OLED displays - while also being compatible with ink-jet printing, which will enable QLED displays to be lower-cost compared to OLEDs.

Google's VR vice president, Clay Bavor, revealed that Google has partnered with "one of the leading OLED makers" on a secret project to develop a high-end VR display. The OLED display will support a resolution of 20 million pixels per eye.

This is a very high resolution - a 4K display has 8.3 million pixels, so it means 2.5X the number of pixels in a 4K display. It terms of display density (which depends on the panel size of course, which we assume to be around 3.5"), this could be around 1,800 PPI.

UBI Research says that AMOLED revenues reached $4.31 billion in Q1 2017, up 15% from Q1 2016. In terms of units sold, UBI says that 99.1 million AMOLED panels were shipped - up 9% from Q1 2016. Obviously this means that average price per panel is up - probably because most of the growth came from higher-end flexible AMOLED displays and larger OLED TV panels.

Looking forward, UBI says that in the next quarters over 100 million AMOLED panels will ship - and over 300,000 OLED TV panels. The total AMOLED maket will grow at a CAGR of 33% - and reach $59.3 billion in 2020.

AU Optronics developed new round AMOLED displays, which they call True-Circle displays, which have slimmer salient corners compared to AUO's current round OLED displays. This enables watch designers more flexibility with their designs.

AUO is demonstrating two such displays, with a diameter of 1.2-inch and 1.4-inch. AUO aims to start mass producing these new displays in the second half of 2017. You can see how these displays look compared to AUO's current "Full Circle" displays.

Production laser deposition equipment developer Solmates announced that it has sold a small panel (200x200 mm) PLD tool to CSOT, to be used in the company's pilot OLED line that is being built in Wuhan, China. CSOT will use the new tool to deposit the ITO electrodes on OLED displays.

Solmates patented the process of OLED ITO electrode deposition using PLD and has developed the technology that enables large-area deposition of ITO on room temperatures. The PLD process results in very high quality ITO deposition and Solmates says that the achieved transparency is higher than currently used methods. Solmates' tool will be placed in CSOT's new cluster tool that is place in Wuhan since the end of 2016. Solmates will deliver the tool in June 2017. The current tool is used for R&D, but the technology can be scaled to larger substrates and to be used in production systems.

Idemitsu Kosan and BOE Display agreed to form a strategic alliance with an aim to develop high-performance OLED materials and displays. Specifically, Idemitsu intends to develop and supply OLED materials in accordance with BOE's needs, as BOE is starting to mass producing OLED displays in several fabs in across China.

Idemitsu Kosan is in the process of expanding its OLED material production at its Korean subsidiary Idemitsu Electronic Materials Korea, and the company also recently established a new OLED materials development company in Switzerland. Idemitsu is supplying its OLED materials to both LG Display and Samsung Display and is apparently enjoying an increased demand and is looking to start selling its materials to BOE DIsplay as well. We recently posted aninterview with Idemitsu's electronics materials chief.

Last Month Hyuandai's premium sub-brand Genesis unveiled a concept car, the GV80 SUV, that featured a long curved OLED display - 22" in size, which we assumed was supplied by SDC. The Korea Herald reports today that Samsung is in talks with Genesis to supply OLED panels for its automobiles.

It's not clear if this first deal involves flexible OLEDs as was demonstrated in the GV80 or whether it will involve regular rigid OLEDs. The Korea Herald reports that Samsung is strongly pushing for a comeback into the automotive market with a range of technologies including displays, batteries and even the Tizen OS.