July 2024

Samsung Display posted its financial results for Q2 2024, with $5.5 billion in sales and $730 million in operating profit. The company says that its mobile AMOLED unit have seen sales growth, driven by solid demand for flagship products, along with effectively supporting new smartphone launches from key customers (i.e. mostly Apple).

SDC also saw increased sales of both IT OLEDs (mostly tablets and laptops), and gaming monitor panels. The company reported stable sales of QD-OLED TV panels. 

Earlier this year we reported that Apple has decided to sign up BOE as its AMOLED supplier for the upcoming budget iPhone SE4 (with a 6.1" AMOLED display). According to reports back then, Apple's low price target ($25) was not profitable for Samsung that decided to not supply any AMOLEDs for this iPhone model.

According to new reports from Korea, Apple now signed up LG Display to supply some of its iPhone SE4 panels - mostly backup (BOE had its issues with Apple before) and support, as BOE will remain the main panels supplier.

OLED emitter materials are the heart of the OLED device, and the materials that make the most impact on the performance of the OLED display. Most OLED displays utilize red, green and blue emitters.

The efficiency of the current state-of-the-art commercial red and green OLED emitters is excellent - it is in fact close to 100% internal quantum efficiency (IQE) which means that you cannot improve much on the efficiency of the emitter itself (there's still work to be done on getting the light out of the device). Blue OLED emission is a completely different story - current commercial blue emitters suffer from very low efficiency, around 25%. This means that three quarters of the energy goes to waste. Changing to a 100% IQE blue emitter could end up improving the total display efficiency by 20-30%.

A few days ago, Everdisplay Optronics started to move-in equipment in its AMOLED module factory in Yangzhou High-tech Industrial Development Zone, in Jiangsu province.

Everdisplay estimates that the total investment in its new module factory will reach $825 million USD, and it will have an annual capacity of 70 million display modules - when its two lines are in operation. The construction of the factory started in December 2023.

Researchers from Korea's Yonsei University developed a new highly-promising stretchable OLED device by sequential coating technique. The new device can stretch up to 70% and maintain 80% brightness after 300 cycles at 40% strain. The OLED offers a maximum brightness of 3,151 nits and a total current efficiency of 5.4 cd/A.

The researchers say that standard stretchable OLEDs (what they refer to as intrinsically-stretchable OLEDs, or is-OLED) suffer from reduced performance due to orthogonal solvent problem and also the standard lamination process may cause defects and delamination. The new technique overcomes these issues.

LG Display reported its financial results for Q2 2024 - with revenues reaching $4.85 billion (an increase of 42% compared to last year) and a net loss of $67 million (down from around $637 million in 2023).

LG Display benefited greatly from Apple's introduction of its 2024 iPad pro tablets, for which LGD is the main AMOLED supplier. The company is also expecting to sell a record number of iPhone AMOLED panels later this year. LGD says that the proportion of OLED products rose 10% of its total sales, reaching 52% - which means that OLED is now the company's main product line in terms of revenues.

China-based EV maker Zeekr introduced the 2024 Zeekr 009 model, a 4/6/7 seater MPV. The new model has two OLED displays: a 15.05" 2.5K flexible OLED main front screen, and a 17" 90Hz 3K ceiling-mounted passenger screen. The 15.05" OLED display seems to be the same display used in the 2024 Zeekr 001 model.

The 2024 Zeekr 009 will feature several seating options, NAPPA leather seats with headrest speakers, ventilation, heating and massage functions, exclusive lounge-chair mode, 30-speaker sound system and high performance - it reach go from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds and has a driving range of up to 740Km. Zeekr plans to start delivering the all-new Zeekr 009 to customers in China next week, starting at 439,000 RMB (around $60,000).

DiaDEM is a platform to boost the development of organic electronics, providing a one-stop-shop solution from digital discovery to experimental verification. DiaDEM comprises an exhaustive database of materials with optoelectronic properties, advanced scientific models for refinement and direct link to the supply chain for efficient procurement of materials for in-house validation. The platform is now ready for beta testing and looking for beta-testers from both academia and industry. Sign up as beta-tester and secure your free DiaDEM credits.

The DiaDEM platform is developed in an EIC Transition-Open project (Grant Agreement No 101057564) by the University of Liverpool (UK), Nanomatch GmbH (Ger) and Mcule.com Kft. (HUN).  DiaDEM revolutionizes R&D in organic electronics (OE) by providing a digital platform to rapidly identify molecules with the desirable combinations of properties and procure the materials for testing to solve three key challenges in OE R&D: (i) design of molecules is limited to chemical intuition and repeated trial & error, with no way to efficiently find materials with desired properties, (ii) there is no efficient way to assess if materials or combination of materials exhibit desired properties when embedded in a device; experimental investigation requires laborious synthesis, purification, device fabrication and measurement; application of advanced computational models requires high-level expertise in underlying science, command-line tools and high-performance computers, (iii) lack of immediate supply of identified candidates prevents rapid experimental validation.

Seoul's Kookmin University researchers concluded a clinical study to verify the impact of TV panels of sleep, measuring the levels of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin in 40 adult men and women divided into groups watching the same content on either LCD or LG's WOLED TVs.

The researcher found that melatonin secretion fell 2.7% over two hours for the LCD group and it increased 8.1% in the OLED TV group. Melatonin rises in the evening to prepare the body for sleep, but the blue light emitted from displays disturbs the melatonin secretion as it confuses the body. As LCDs emit about twice as much blue light as OLEDs, it is not a surprise they have this effect on melatonin levels.