A report from Korea says that LG Display has successfully developed an OLED panel that is based on a blue phosphorescence emitter. The blue PHOLED, provided by Universal Display, offers 100% IQE, up from 25% used by current fluorescence emitters. This will result in around 20-30% power saving for the display itself (depending on the images shown).
UDC has been developing blue emitters for many years, and recently the company said that the development will take a few more months and won't be ready in 2024. The main challenge is increasing the lifetime of the materials. However LG Display has adopted a tandem design to enable a commercially ready display, perhaps even sooner than UDC planned.
A tandem architecture uses two OLED structures, one on top of the other, which can be used to achieve the same brightness as a usual single-stack OLED but with lower current - which means that the lifetime of the OLED materials is extended (a tandem-stack OLED is also more efficient, or can be used to create higher-brightness devices).
LG Display commercialized tandem displays back in 2019 for the automotive market (that has strict demands on display lifetimes). Recently the company also adopted tandem OLEDs for tablet displays (mainly Apple's iPad Pro devices) and also it is the first company to commercialize a tandem laptop display. Now it is using the same architecture to enable the adoption of blue PHOLED.
According to the report, LG Display plans to finalize the development soon and will consider commercializing such a display 'within a year', which could mean that LGD will be ready with blue-PHOLED OLEDs first, giving it an edge over its competitors, as such a display could consumer around 30-50% less energy compared to a standard OLED. Such a display will be more expensive though - as the production process is more complicated, it requires double the amount of OLED frontplane materials, and it is likely that the price of UDC's blue emitters will be rather high, higher than that of its red and green materials. Indeed this development could be excellent news for UDC, that will supply the red, green and blue PHOLEDs for LGD's future tandem OLEDs.
It is not entirely clear, but it could be that LGD is actually adopting an architecture in which one of the layers in the tandem stack uses a blue PHOLED material, and the other a blue fluorescence emitter. Used wisely, such a design could be quite attractive indeed.
Last month we reported that LGD has developed a new tandem OLED technology (which it refers to as 3rd-Gen Tandem OLEDs), enabling a power reduction of around 20%. Perhaps these new tandem blue-PHOLED displays are indeed LG's 3rd-Gen Tandem OLEDs.
If this report is true, it is interesting to see LG Display again leading over Samsung Display and the first company to commercialize a new OLED technology. We have recently posted an article that discusses LGD's technology lead over Samsung, mostly driven by its tandem OLED process technology. Another article that could of interest is our discussion on novel next-generation OLED technologies that will drive higher efficiency and brightness OLEDs.
If you want to stay updated on the latest OLED material, process and architecture trends, gain meaningful insights into the OLED industry, and also have access to structured industry data, our OLED Toolbox can be an extremely useful tool. The OLED Toolbox was updated yesterday.
Disclosure: The author of this post holds shares in UDC
Great news: Hoping to see a press release soon, announcing Samsung signing a contract to use UDC's new blue.
From what UDC has said, all other customers will be able to use blue, under their current contracts.