Flexible OLEDs: introduction and market status - Page 31

OLEDWorks announces two new OLED lighting panels, the rigid Lumiblade Brite 3 panels and the BendOLED flexible ones.

The Brite 3 OLEDs are more efficient than OLEDWorks' current Brite 2 OLEDs, offering an efficiency of up to 85 lm/W. The brightness is 300 lumens (8,500 cd/m²) and the lifetime is 100,000 hours (L70, at 100 lumens). The Brite 3 OLEDs are available in two colors and offer a CRI of >90. The Brite 3 are offered in three product shapes: square, rectangle and round. These Lumiblade panels will be produced at OLEDWorks' Aachen production site.

Tianma demonstrated its flexible and foldable AMOLED displays at MWC 2018 earlier a couple of weeks ago, and the following video shows a nice tour of the displays at Tianma's booth.

The first display you see is a 5.5" FHD flexible AMOLED (on a Polyimide substrate). There's a long discussion there about creating a foldable Phone around that, but beyond that it is nice to see Tianma's flexible OLEDs in action.

In early 2017 LG introduced its Crystal Sound OLED technology, which vibrates a flexible OLED display panel and turns it into a speaker. This technology can create seamless OLED TV designs that do not require speakers.

In a very natural move, LGD announced today that it will bring the Crystal Sound technology to its OLED lighting panels as well. LGD will unveil the first OLED lighting speakers at the Light and Building tradeshow next week in Germany. You can see a couple of such lighting speaker designs above.

Researchers from Korea's ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) developed a flexible OLED panel that use a transparent graphene electrode. ETRI will detail this new graphene-based OLED panel at SID DisplayWeek 2018 in May.

A rigid graphene-based OLED prototype (ETRI 2017)

The researchers produced a "fully operational" 40x40 mm OLED panel that uses the pixelated graphene film as electrodes.

Asahi Glass developed an ultra-thin chemically strengthened 0.07 mm flexible glass that has a bending stress of over 1200 MPa - which makes it possible to use this as a cover glass for foldable devices with a curvature radius of 2.5 mm or even lower.

AGC 0.1 mm flexible glass (2011)

To create this glass, AGC developed a new process that achieved 80% higher impact-failure resistance compared to glass with conventional chemical strengthening. AGC will discuss this new glass at SID Displayweek 2018 in May - and will also hopefully demonstrate it.

In April 2017 OLEDWorks announced its roadmap for 2018-2020, stating that it will released 80-100 lm/W flexible panels in 2018. It seems that the company indeed started producing flexible curved OLED panels, even though it did not announce this officially.

Germany-based producer WALO-TL announced it will present two new OLED lighting lamps (the WALOSUMMER and WALOSPRING) - and both use a range of panels made by OLEDWorks, including curved rectangular panels. In addition, OLEDWorks published the following image on its instagram feed, showing an RGB Studio lamp that uses what seems to be the same panels.

In October 2017 BOE started to produce flexible OLED displays at its first flexible OLED line, the Chengdu B7 6-Gen fab. In addition to this fab in Chengdu, in October 2016 BOE announced another 6-Gen OLED fab, in Mianyang, with a similar capacity.

In November 2017 reports from Korea suggested that BOE is planning its third flexible OLED Line, as the Chinese company aims to ramp up production quickly and be able to supply flexible OLEDs to Apple in the future. Today BOE officially announced its plans to construct its third line in Chongqing's Liangjiang New District. BOE's new fab will cost 46.5 billion Yuan, or about $7.3 billion USD.

Sumitomo Chemical announced it will exhibit new OLED lighting fixtures at Light+Building 2018. This is the fourth time that Sumitomo shows its OLEDs at this leading lighting bi-annual trade fair.

Japanese lighting designer Motoko Ishii is the art director of Sumitomo's booth and is showcasing several OLED chandeliers, including the OLED MINORI you see above. Motoko Ishii has been working with Sumitomo for a while now.

IHS Markit says that flexible AMOLED shipments more than tripled in 2017, and revenues reached $12 billion (up from $3.5 billion in 2016). Rigid OLED revenues decreased by 14%. In 2018 flexible OLED revenues will reach around $23 billion, and rigid OLEDs will also increase slightly to about $11 billion.

In 2016 most flexible OLED were used in a curved form factor (edge-type phones), but in 2017 about half of flexible OLED displays were used in a flat form factor (such as in the iPhone X).

Vivo demonstrated a new concept device called the APEX, that includes several new innovative technologies. The most impressive is the front display, which is a 5.99" 2160×1440 flexible OLED display that is almost completely covers the front of the phone - the top and side bezels measure just 1.8 mm and the bottom is 4.3 mm.

This is an impressive design - but it causes some problems - for example there is no room for a selfie camera, and Vivo solved this via a pop-out camera unit (which looks like the popping flash units in pocket cameras). The design also leaves no room for a speaker - and Vivo designed a new Screen SoundCasting technology which vibrates the whole display, similar in a way to LG's CrystalSound TVs.