Japan Display (JDI) announced that it has signed a technology development agreement with Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) regarding the development of Oxide-semiconductor backplane technology for next-generation displays, including OLED displays.
SEL's backplane technology is called c-axis aligned crystal (CAAC), which has been co-developed with Sharp. CAAC is based on an IGZO thin-film that has a novel crystal structure.
SEL says that CAAC-IGZO (which they call CAAC-OS for oxide semiconductor) features extremely low off-state current - which dramatically reduces power consumption.
SEL successfully fabricated CAAC-OS prototype backplane, and over the past years the company demonstrated several novel CAAC-OS AMOLEDs, including a foldable OLED (together with Nokia), a 13.3" 8K (664 PPI) AMOLED, a 81" 8K tiled flexible OLED and a hybrid OLED-reflective-LCD prototype.
Japan Display seems to be stepping up its OLED efforts - as the display maker aims to become Apple's 2nd AMOLED supplier. A few months ago it was reported that Japan Display (JDI) aims to acquire JOLED. JDI was interested in Sharp's LCD division, originally, but Sharp finally decided to sell out to Foxconn. In 2015, it was reported that JOLED is in talks with Apple for a possible supply agreement for Apple's future iPAD devices.
