January 2019

LG Display reported its financial results for Q4 2018 - it reported an operating profit of ₩279 billion ($250 million USD) due to strong shipments of IT panels and OLED TVs. LGD however gave a weak outlook to 2019 (for its LCD business).

LGD says that it will invest $7.1 billion in 2019 in capacity expansion, and $3.5 billion in 2020. It will divert all of its investments into OLED displays - with 60% going to large area OLED TV production and 40% going to small/medium pOLED production.

LG Display has been demonstrating its pOLED automotive displays for a long time (reportedly it signed an agreement with Mercedes back in 2016, and with Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors in 2018).

During the company's recent conference call, LGD's CFO, D.H. Seo, said that they expect to see some revenus from its automotive pOLED business "by the end of 2019".

Last week Xiaomi unveiled a new prototype smartphone that uses a tri-foldable OLED display. The demonstration looks very nice, although the company did not disclose any information or specification.

Digitimes claims that Visionox is the supplier of the foldable OLEDs. Visionox is also the supplier of the foldable OLEDs used by Nubia for its upcoming (?) Alpha foldable device.

Researchers from the Fraunhofer FEP Institute developed a miniaturized OLED-on-silicon based phosphorescence sensor. Such sensors are used today typically for oxygen concentration measurement. The researchers say that this technology enables a small-sized sensor that offers a fast and precise evaluation. In the future such sensors could be produced at a relatively low cost.

The new sensor is based on a chemical marker that is excited by modulated blue OLED light. The phosphorescent response of the marker is then detected directly inside the sensor chip. The OLED device is 4.7 x 2.2 mm in size. The researchers hope to be able to reduce the size of the entire chip down to 2 x 2 mm.

Universal Display announced an OLED evaluation agreement with China-based OLED Microdisplay producer Seeya Information Technology. UDC will supply Seeya with its phosphorescent OLED materials for display applications. The two companies did not disclose any more details.

In September 2017 Seeya announced plans to build an OLED microdisplay production line in Hefei, China. Seeya's fab will have a yearly capacity of 20 million displays, and will require an investment of almost $300 million USD.

DSCC released its cost and prices estimates for Samsung's smartphone OLEDs. For rigid OLEDs production costs range from $23 for a 5.5" FHD AMOLED to $32 for a 7.21" 2244x1080 one (see chart below). For some of its rigid OLEDs, SDC enjoys a high operating margin of 30%.

Flexible OLEDs are of course much more expensive - a 5.5" 2560x1440 panel costs almost $70, while a 6.46" 2688x1242 panel costs around $90 (as can be seen in the chart below). As in rigid OLEDs, the larger displays have a higher operating margin (up to 26% for the 6.46" panel).

You can compare DSCC's production costs estimates with the recently released IHS production costs here. IHS estimates a 5.7" rigid OLED at $18.62 (DSCC: 5.8" at $23) and a 5.8" flexible OLED at $22.61 (DSCC: 5.5" costs $70 - that's quite a difference!).

Casio's interesting PRO TEK WSD-F30 smartwatch is is now shipping for $549 (note: affiliate link to Amazon). The PRO TEK is an Android Wear OS deviec that sports a round 1.2" round 390x390 AMOLED display with a monochrome transparent LCD on top that can be used to conserve battery life (up to a month with wireless off). The watch features a MIL-STSD-810 certification, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

LG Display had an impressive booth at CES 2019, show off the company's latest display technologies - and most of these were OLED displays, of course. LGD sent us this nice video that shows the main displays at their booth:

The video shows LG's flower OLED installation made up from four curved 65" OLED TV panels, the 88" Crystal-Sound-OLED (CSO) panel with the built-in speaker, LG's new 65" Crystal-Motion OLED (which features an MPTR of 3.5 ms - the world's fastest according to LGD) and finally LG's latest 55" transparent OLED panels.

Researchers from Italy's ISOF-CNR, University of Naples "Federico II" and Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia have developed new organic n-type FET transistors based on CVD graphene sheets. The researchers say that the new process and materials they used can enable flexible, transparent and short-channel OFETs - which could be used in the future for OLED or OLET displays.

To create the new transistors, the researchers used thermally evaporated thin-films of PDIF-CN2 (a perylene diimide derivative, specifically Flexterra's ActiveInk N1100) as the organic semiconductor for the active channel of the transistor, with the single-layer CVD graphene (grown at Italy's IIT INSTITUTE) as the electrode material

Chinese electric vehicle maker GAC has unveiled a new concept car called the ENTRANZE EV Detroit Auto Show. The new concept is a 7-person multi-purpose utility vehicle:

GAC's new ENTRANZE VE concept uses several OLED displays, including large flexible OLEDs on both sides of the instrument panel.