OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 9

Digitimes reports that AU Optronics has setup a 3.5-Gen test ink-jet OLED printing line, and the company now intends to start building a 6-Gen production line. AUO will start constructing the line before the end of 2019.

AUO's Chairman confirmed that the latest advances in printing materials and equipment are starting to make OLED printing viable for commercial use. AUO has not yet decided the schedule for volume production.

JOLED announced that it has raised 25.5 billion Yen (around $228 million USD) from INCJ, Sony and Nissha. JOLED also announced that it has started to build post-processing module production lines at its Mobara, Chiba prefecture, plant. Nissha will also collaborate with JOLED in the area of OLED touch sensors.

JOLED's printed OLED displays will be produced at the company's Nomi plant. JOLED currently uses a pilot 4.5-Gen line at Nomi, but the company has already announced plans for a new mass production 5.5-Gen line in Nomi by 2020.

In early 2018 ASUS announced the Asus ProArt PQ22UC- a 21.6" 4K (204 PPI) ultra-portable OLED monitor, and now the company finally started shipping the new device - starting in the UK where the price is set at for £4,529 (!) which would make the US price at around $5,000.

The OLED display in ASUS' monitor produced using an ink-jet printing process by JOLED - which would make this the world's first ink-jet printed OLED product. JOLED's production capacity is not large, the company is still using a pilot-scale line, but it's likely that Asus is not expecting to sell many units of this high-end OLED monitor with that price tag...

TCL unveiled that the company is developing a new hybrid display technology that uses a blue OLED emitter coupled with red and green QD emitters. All three emitter materials will be combined and printed using ink-jet printing technology. TCL calls this technology H-QLED and this could prove to be the technology of choice for TCL's future high-end emissive TV displays.

It seems as TCL believes that commercial-level red and green QD emitters will be achievable in the future, but blue QD emission will be more difficult to develop, and hence it will rely on OLED emitters. TCL did not disclose more details - but this R&D effort is being performed at the company's Juhua Printing platform.

Guangdong Juhua Printing Display Technology was established in 2016 by CSOT and Tianma with an aim to develop OLED ink-jet printing technologies and enable companies in China to collaborate on this technology.

While TCL-owned CSOT already announced that it is collaborating with Kateeva (and others), it was not clear whether Juhua Printing Display was also using Kateeva's printers, but we now have confirmation that indeed the China-based consortium is based on Kateeva's printers. This is obviously a major win for Kateeva, who is also working with BOE and Samsung, among others.

At the OLED Korea conference, both Merck and Sumitomo detailed their latest OLED inkjet material performance.

Sumitomo is advancing with its R&D efforts, and the company says that its PLED materials will be adopted in mass production systems by 2020 (although JOLED already uses PLEDs in its displays).

Tianma demonstrated new display technologies at Embedded World in Germany, including two new OLED prototypes. First up is a 10.3" 91 PPI transparent AMOLED panel that features a transparency of up to 50% and high brightness (not disclosed).

The second display is a 4.92" 403 PPI AMOLED that was produced using an ink-jet printing process. Tianma's technology was jointly developed with Guangdong Juhua Printing and Display Technology (which was established in 2016 by CSoT and TianMa).

Earlier this month JOLED unveiled new display prototypes at FineTech Japan. Today we have received this interesting new video from JOLED that shows the displays in action:

In the video you can see all of JOLED's new prototypes. First up is the Automotive demo - JOLED demonstrated two panels, a 12.3" 1920x720 (167 PPI) panel and a 12.2" 1920x1280 (180 PPI) panel. Both are printed on LTPS backplanes (as do the rest of the company's small and medium sized panels). JOLED's latest investors, Denso and Toyoto Tsusho, are both helping the company with its entry into the automotive display market.

According to ETNews, Samsung Display has made significant progress with its OLED ink-jet printing process technology, and the company now aims to apply this technology to produce medium-sized panels for OLED laptops and OLED monitors. Samsung may also use this process to produce smaller tablet displays.

It seems that Samsung is aiming to settle on three main next-generation OLED technologies - evaporation (FMM) OLEDs for small-sized display, ink-jet OLED deposition for medium-sized panels and hybrid QD-OLEDs for large-area OLED TV panels. It's other display technologies are QD-LEDs for TVs and Micro-LEDs for next-generation small and large area displays.

Japan-based printed OLED developer JOLED demonstrated several new OLED displays at Finetech Japan last week. We already posted on these new OLEDs, and now we have photos of the new panels.

So first up is JOLED's first OLED TV panel. The 55" 4K (3840x2160, 80 PPI) panel offers a 120Hz refresh rate and a color gamut of 100% DCI (135% sRGB) and is printed on JOLED's Transparent Amorphous Oxide Semiconductor (TAOS) backplane.