Automotive OLEDs: introduction and industry news - Page 31

Today we published new versions of our Automotive and Flexible OLED market reports. OLED-Info provides comprehensive niche OLED market reports, and our reports cover everything you need to know about the niche market, and can be useful if you want to understand how the OLED industry works and what this technology can provide for your own industry. The reports are now updated to March 2015.

The Flexible OLED Market Report:

• Why flexible displays and lighting panels are so exciting
• What kind of flexible displays are currently on the market
• What the future holds for flexible OLEDs
• How to acquire flexible OLEDs for your products

The report package provides a good introduction to the flexible OLED market - present and future. It details both flexible displays and lighting technologies. Read more here!

Japan-based Ason Technology unveiled their first OLED lighting panel in 2013, and last year we featured an article discussing the company's technology and business. In a recent interview to Sangyo-Times, the company's CEO reveals some interesting updates.

Ason spent almost eight years to develop a new multi-stack structure that can be used to create OLED with many layers, which results in long-lasting high-brightness panels. The company now reports that it developed an OLED with twelve (!) emitting layers, which enables it to reach a high brightness of 50,000 cd/m².

Last month BMW demonstrated a new concept car, the M4 Concept Iconic Lights that featured two new lighting technologies - the laserlight headlights and the OLED based tail lights and rear direction indicators. Today OSRAM announced that BMW uses the company OLEDs (the laserlight is also made by OSRAM).

When showing the car, BMW said that they aim to launch a production model with OLEDs in the "near future". In April 2014 BMW said that the future lighting technology for their automobiles will be OLED, and that BMW expects to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years.

Continental AG, a German automotive manufacturing company, demonstrates a new dual-screen flexible AMOLED solution for the automotive market. The screen is made from two smaller AMOLEDs, one concave and one convex and is aimed towards the secondary display of the car.

This is just a demonstrator by Continental, but as you can see in the video it is fully working. The displays are made either by LG Display (who already signed deals with Germany auto makers for the supply of flexilble OLEDs) or Samsung Display (who supplied Audi with a flexible OLED display for the Prologue prototype).

Audi had a nice OLED-based lighting installation at their booth at CES. They used 124 OLED panels (about 7x7 cm each) to form the Audi logo. Those OLEDs are red in color, probably as this is the standard backlight color for EU and US cars. The installation is a moving 3D one, and the Audi rings are formed from all sides, which makes it look a bit weird in the photo.

Audi has been mostly collaborating with Philips on OLED lighting, which leads me to believe that the red OLEDs used in this installation are made by Philips, but they also showed some designs in the past using OSRAM-made OLEDs.

Osram unveiled a new hybrid LED-OLED car rearlamp prototype device. Osram suggests using the OLED for the turn indicator and the rear light itself, while the LEDs are used for the stoplight, reverse light and also in the turn indicator alongside the OLEDs.

As you can see in the photo above, the device includes the four basic rear light functions: stoplight (LED and LED light guide, top left), reverse light (LED, top right), turn indicator (OLED and LED light guide, bottom left) and rear light (OLED only, bottom right).

LG Display's CEO, Han Sang-Beom, says that LG expects to ship 600,000 OLED panels in 2015 and 1.5 million in 2016. The company wants to be the OLED leaders, and Han says they expect competition soon from Chinese, Korean and Japanese makers (he specifically mentions JOLED) but LG aims to lead from the start in this market.

LG Display says that the global high-end TV market is estimated at about 4 million sets, which means they actually aim to capture a 37.5% market share. This also means that even in 2016, LG sees OLEDs remaining in the "high-end" segment.

BMW is demonstrating a new concept car, the M4 Concept Iconic Lights with two new lighting technologies - the laserlight headlights and the OLED based tail lights and rear direction indicators. BMW is using many small thin OLEDs to create a 3D effect.

BMW says that they will launch a production model with OLEDs in the "near future". In April 2014 BMW said that the future lighting technology for their automobiles will be OLED, and that BMW expects to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years.

BMW announced that it is going to showcase new OLED lighting technologies at CES 2015 next week, and the German automaker plans to unveil its "BMW Organic Light" taillight concepts.

BMW Vision Future Luxury

In May 2014, BMW unveiled their BMW Vision Future Luxury design concept, which used several new display intefaces and OLED taillights. It's likely that the new concept on display next week will have an updated design or panels. The OLED supplier to the Vision Future Luxury is Astron Fiamm (owners of the Blackbody consumer OLED brand).

A few day ago Audi unveiled a new concept two-door car, the Prologue - which uses several new OLED technologies. Audi were kind enough to update me on those new OLEDs and provide some technical details.

So first up is the bendable OLED panel, which is integrated to the center console tunnel and is nearly invisible when not in use. This display is "ergonomically adapted to the driver" and is used for climate control, handwriting input and other vehicle settings. When the car is started, the display pops up and Audi says that the fact that it bends ensures a constant distance to the hand which makes for better ergonomics. When operating the display, the wrist rests on the low-positioned gear selector lever of the eight-speed tiptronic.