Flexible OLEDs: introduction and market status - Page 12

In July 2020 LG Electronics announced that it aims to be the first company to introduce a rollable OLED smartphone - as early as the beginning of 2021. The company has now released a new teaser, showing the upcoming smartphone in action:

Unlike other rollable smartphone designs, LG's phone opens up on the wide size of the phone, to become an tablet form factor. LG did not give any information, specification or release date on what could be the world's first rollable phone.

LG Display announced that it has developed and employed new OLED technologies, including new OLED materials and a new OLED device structure (with a new added layer) that enabled it to improve the efficiency of its large-area WOLED panels by around 20%. This enabled LGD to increase the brightness of its OLEDs.

The first display to adopt this new structure and materials is the company's 77-inch OLED panel, but LGD will also apply it to its other panels over 2021. LGD also announced that it will start producing 83-inch and 42-inch OLED TV panels, that will join its existing 48-, 55-, 65-, 77- and 88-inch models.

Mercedes announced that its upcoming EQS electric vehicle will adopt a large curved front display, 56-inch in size, called the MBUX Hyperscreen.

This is a flexible OLED display, that will stretch over the entire width of the car. Note that the OLED itself is not 56-inch in size, this display embeds what seems to be 3 different OLED displays. The 56-inch glass also includes holes for the air-vents which are integrated into the display. The whole system is powered by 8 CPU cores, 24 GB of RAM and AI software that learns your habits.

LG Display will demonstrate a 48-inch bendable gaming monitor, at CES 2021 (January 11). The whole panel is just 0.6 mm thick, which enabled LG to embed its Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO) technology in the monitor, which turns it into a large speaker. The monitor offers a response time of 0.1 ms and a refresh rate of 40Hz to 120Hz.

The display can bend up to radius of 1,000 mm so it can be used both as a flat TV and a curved screen for immersive gaming. This seems to be a prototype display, it's not clear when we'll see a monitor producer adopting it and bringing it to market.

According to reports from Korea, Visionox has started production at its M4 flexible OLED module line in Guangzhou.

Earlier this month Visionox announced that it lighted up its 6-Gen flexible OLED production line in Hefei, Anhui, China. The company is quickly ramping up its production capacity and is also planning a fourth panel production line in Chengdu.

Notion Systems, MBraun and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research (Fraunhofer IAP) are co-developing new inkjet production technologies, aimed for the display market - specifically for OLED, QD and microdisplays.

The three partners are combining their respective competencies to present themselves together as a partnership supplier off all-in-one solutions. The Fraunhofer IAP is developing custom-made processes for display manufacturing with tailor-made inks. To achieve an industrial-scale best-in-class process solution, the parties are looking into all major pre-and post-processing steps, the substrate and the production equipment such as the inkjet print head.

Last month we posted that the Korean Elec publication claims that Apple is aiming to adopt OLEDs in its next iPad Pro devices - and as Apple wants extended lifetime from these panels, the Korean panel makers are developing tandem OLED devices (easier for LG as it is already producing such panels for automotive applications).

Today another Korean publication, ETNews, has posted that Apple is aiming to start using OLEDs in its iPads in 2022. According to ETNews, Apple indeed reached out to both LG Display and Samsung Display for these OLEDs.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Universal Display are developing a low-cost roll-to-roll (R2R) process to produce flexible OLED lighting panels. The goal is to achieve a panel cost of less than $10 per klm - a tenfold reduction compared to current costs.

The roll-to-coll system can continuously produce encapsulation panels, at high speeds and reduce costs. The front plane (organic stack) deposition is done via OVPD. The researchers say the will demonstrate reliable, encapsulated 25 cm² flexible white OLED panels with an efficacy of 50 lm/W and a CRI >85 on barrier-coated plastic films or thin glass.

DSCC says that the utilization rates at flexible OLED production lines have risen sharply in Q3 2020 - from around 40% to around 65% - mostly due to production for Apple's iPhones. A rise in Q3 utilization has also happened in past years, for the same reason.

It is also interesting to note that OLED TV utilization rates are decreasing - part of the reason is that LG's OLED fabs had limited capacity until now and operated at almost 100% rates, but as capacity increases LG is no longer capacity constrained.

Chinese OLED developer Royole announced that it will establish a 16 billion yuan ($2.4 billion USD) OLED production line in Qingdao, China.

Royole did not provide any details, besides that this production line will be used to make flexible and foldable OLEDs. We do not know yet the timeline, technologies and production capacity at the new line.