New OLED development to be discussed at SID 2014

The SID Display Week, the world's leading display industry showcase is scheduled for June, but the organizers already published the list of papers to be presented in this show. Hiding in this long list of technical achievements and research projects are some interesting new OLED developments. So here's some of the achievements to be announced during the show (at no particular order).

TCL's China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) managed to fabricate a 7" QVGA (320x240) flexible PMOLED display. The display uses a thin PEN substrate, processed at Gen-4.5. The company also proposes a design for a 14" QVGA PMOLED panel. CSOT also developed a 31" Full-HD AMOLED panel that uses a IGZO backplane. The 31" direct-emission panel was produced on a Gen-4.5 glass substrate using FMM.

China's BOE has been developing flexible OLEDs for quite some time (they even aim to commercially produce plastic-based flexible OLEDs at their upcoming Gen-5.5 fab in Ordos). BOE developed a 9.55" flexible AMOLED on an IGZO backplane. The substrate is polyimide and the OLED is a top-emission structure.

AUO's president said that OLED TVs may take years to challenge LCDs (if ever), but the company is still researching OLED TV technologies. In SID 2013 AUO demonstrated a 65" Oxide-TFT AMOLED TV prototype and for this year's event they developed a 65" OLED panel in which the HIL, HTL and all emitting materials were deposited using inkjet printing. AUO says that they achieved good pixel uniformity by optimizing the printing and vacuum dry conditions.

Universal Display will unveil a new AMOLED display architecture. UDC says that their new design will feature improved lifetime and comparable power consumption to RGB side-by-side AMOLEDs, but will enable a new fabrication process that only requires two low-resolution masking steps instead of the three high-res masking steps required in current AMOLED production.

In CES 2014, LG announced a new 55" curved OLED TV (the 55EB9600) that is more energy efficient than the current 55EA9800 model. Now LG Display details a new power reduction technology for OLED TVs (called Adaptive SVDD) that may be behind the new TV. Adaptive SVDD is an external compensation technology that substantially reduces the number of TFTs and capacitors. LG Display reports that this technology decreased the power consumption by 30.6%, the voltage by 25% and it also increases the gray scale by 25.8%.

Finally, we have Sharp, Advanced Film Device and SEL that have developed a 13.3" 8K OLED display. This high resolution display (664 PPI!) uses a C-axis-aligned crystalline oxide semiconductor (CAAC-OS) backplane. SEL's previous 13" CAAC-OS OLED prototype featured 326 PPI (this was a flexible panel, though).