Flexible OLEDs: introduction and market status - Page 8

DSCC has released its latest OLED market forecast, and the company forecasts a 8% CAGR revenue growth, with the market reaching $64 billion in revenue in 2026. The growth will be fueled by high demand for laptop, monitor and tablet displays. The smartphone and OLED TV market will also continue to grow.

DSCC sees a 31% CAGR shipment growth for laptop displays, to reach around $2.4 billion in 2026, and a 95% CAGR unit growth for monitor OLED displays, which will reach $1.3 billion in 2026 (up from $200 million in 2022). This is fast growth for monitor OLED displays, but slower than DSCC previously estimated, due to competition for miniLEDs, rigid OLED capacity that will be used for laptops and tablets and lower demand to mirroring display monitors.

Design house Look Labs announced a new product, a Hoodie called the omfy420 Metalight Hoodie that features the design house's CryptoPunk #5402, which is targeted for gamers who play Look Labs' own 420 game and can buy the hoodie from within the game and

The Hoodie features an Inuru's OLED lighting device which lights up the eyes of the figure in the hoodie. Inuru's OLEDispowered by an integrated thin-film battery that can be recharged wirelessly, and the whole system is washable and easy to integrate into textiles.

The 2022 Mercedes EQE electric car comes with either a 12.8-inch AMOLED or (optionally) Mercedes' MBUX Hyperscreen. The Hyperscreen is a 56-inch display, actually made from three different OLED units, embedded in a single glass display. There's a central 17.7-inch panel plus two 12.3-inch panels. The 56-inch glass also includes holes for the air-vents which are integrated into the display.

The MBUX Hyperscreen was first used in the higher-end EQS electric car. The 'lower-end' 12.8-inch AMOLED screen, shown below, is used in the 2021 S-class cars. We speculated that LG Display is supplier to Mercedes (the two companies have been working together since around 2016) and LG Display earlier this week officially confirmed that it is indeed Mercedes' OLED supplier.

OLED driver IC developer MagnaChip announced that it is expanding its OLED IC product lineup as it is developing a next-generation OLED DDIC for automotive displays.

Magnachip is developing an OLED DDIC for automotive based on the 40nm process technology, targeting center stack displays and instrument cluster displays. The company plans to supply the new product to premium European car manufacturers in the first half of 2023. The new driver will support a wide range of resolutions (including FHD) and will work with both rigid and flexible OLED displays.

Researchers from the UK's Queen Mary University of London together with scientists from graphene develop Paragraf have successfully fabricated a flexible OLED device with a monolayer graphene anode instead of the usually-used ITO anode.

The researchers say that this is the first time such a device was demonstrated. It was shown that the graphene-OLED has identical performance to an ITO-OLED. The researchers used high-quality monolayer graphene directly deposited on a transparent substrate using a commercially available MOCVD system.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities managed to deposit flexible OLED devices using 3D printing. The whole OLED stack (including the electrodes, interconnects, insulation, and encapsulation) was printed using a table-top 3D printer (custom build, and reportedly costing like a Tesla Model S).

The researchers used the new method to create a low-cost flexible OLED display of sort, made from relatively large pixels (see video above). The whole panel is 1.5 x 1.5 inch in size, with 64 pixels. The team is now working to improve the density of the process.

Samsung Display launched a new web site dedicated to its OLED technologies, that shows the properties and applications of its OLED displays, and includes lot's of media and links that explains the benefit of OLED technology, how it works, etc.

In the new site Samsung Display also unveils its new flexible OLED branding - "Flex" which includesthe company's flexible foldable and rollable displays.

DSCC says that 2021 will see strong growth in OLED production. Flexible OLED production glass input is expected to grow by 36% in 2021, while rigid OLED input will grow even stronger at 42%.

The utilization rates at OLED production lines are still relatively low, especially at BOE's flexible OLED lines. As of the end of 2021, flexible OLED utilization rates are around 70%, rigid OLED utilization is at about 77% while OLED TV utilization is higher at around 85%. LG's utilization rates are lower than earlier in 2021, which DSCC says is intentional to support prices

Panasonic announced a new thermoset stretchable film for printed electronics, called Beyolex. Panasonic targets several applications for its new film, including OLED substrates and encapsulation film.

Beyolex is based on a proprietary non-silicone thermoset polymer chemistry developed by Panasonic researchers at the company's Electronic Materials laboratory in Osaka, Japan. The film features softness, conformability, high temperature resistance, and ultra-low permanent deformation after stretching.

This is a sponsored post by 3D-MicroMac

Laser cutting processes of glass materials based on filament technology have been increasingly adopted in industrial applications. Besides standard glass thicknesses ultra-thin glass offers exciting opportunities for further improvements of new devices.

The main reason for this is the perfect match of material properties like mechanical resistance and flexibility as well as optical performance. The required machining processes to perform perimeter cutting as well as structuring and via drilling are confronted with high quality requirements.