Samsung Display and LG Display are both gearing up to build 8-Gen AMOLED production lines, aiming to supply Apple (and others) with OLEDs for IT devices - laptops and tablets, mostly. Last month Samsung announced that it will convert an existing LCD line in Asan to OLED production, with an estimated cost of $3.1 billion. 

According to a new report from Korea, the slowdown in Apple's laptop sales is a cause of worry for the OLED producers, who have delayed the plans to build the new fabs, and delayed equipment orders. The main problem for the OLED makers is that the slowdown in Apple's sales may drive Apple to want to low the price of the laptop displays, which would put a stress on the profitability of new OLED fabs.

Visionox is introducing a new OLED production technology, called Visionox Intelligent Pixelization (or ViP for short) that enables higher-density display production, at over 1,700 PPI.

The idea behind ViP is to replace the fine metal mask (FMM) method with photolithography-based pixel patterning. The process offers several advantages, mainly the increase of aperture ratio to almost 70% (Visionox says the currently reach 69%). FMM methods usually achieve up to 30%, which means that brightness, efficiency and lifetime can all be increased.

The MicroLED Industry Association (MIA), a cross-industry association created to accelerate the adoption of microLED display technologies and facilitate collaborations between companies in the MicroLED industry, is proud to announce The MicroLED Library.

Image

This new platform is an extensive compilation of MicroLED datasheets, presentations, whitepapers and more. To date, it already curates content from various companies (including GE, Terecircuits, Radiant Vision Systems, CEA-Leti and more), some of which is available in several languages, and includes the MIA's own whitepapers. The MicroLED Library is public and free for everyone to use. It will be continuously updated in order to remain a valuable resource for MicroLED information. You can access it here!

This is a sponsored post by WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem

To speed up material development and transfer laboratory results quickly and efficiently to mass production in highly competitive markets with short innovation cycles, WeylChem InnoTec combines its many years of in-depth electronic chemical process development expertise with IT-Chem's manufacturing excellence. WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem are aware of the increasing demand for deuterated materials and sublimation in the organic electronics industry and therefore operate cutting-edge technology for commercial scale deuterium oxide (D₂O) production and state-of-the-art sublimation quipment to enable material development to commercial manufacturing at both sites - a unique
offering in the CDMO landscape.

Benefits to electronic material companies from the strategic alliance are manifold - the supply of sublimated pilot quantities developed in Germany and, at the customer's discretion, manufacture and sublimation of commercial volumes in South Korea or Germany. The promise to customers is the seamless transfer or split of manufacture and sublimation of their products between production sites, if desired. The end-to-end solution offered by WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem enables fast, efficient, and flexible realization of customer’s projects from sampling to commercial quantities in reliably highest purity and deuteration levels.

eMagin announced that it developed (and demonstrated) a 15,000 nits WUXGA (1920x1200) full-color OLED microdisplay, setting a new world record (surpassing eMagin's own 10,000 nits record from 2021).

This new microdisplay was deposited using the company's direct-patterning (dPd) technology, which means that there are no color filters. This is a single-stack device, and eMagin says that in the future it could use a tandem architecture to improve the performance further.

Universal Display Corporation announced that it has acquired Merck's Phosphorescent OLED Emitter Intellectual Property (IP) assets. This portfolio includes over 550 issued and pending patents around 172 patent families with an average lifetime of 10 years, and represents over 15 years of R&D. 

The two companies also entered into a multi-year collaboration agreement, in which the two companies will create advanced PHOLED stacks based on UDC's OLED green and yellow emitters and Merck's transport and host materials.

Universal Display reported its financial results for Q1 2023, with revenues of $130 million (down from $150 million last year) and net income of $40 million (down from $50 million in 2022).

UDC says that near-term demand for OLED displays is still soft, but the company remains confident on the long-term growth path for OLED displays. Looking ahead into 2023, the company expects yearly revenues to be in the range of $550 million to $600 million.