PMOLED (Passive Matrix OLED): introduction and basics - Page 10

Nanomarkets released a new report covering the transparent OLED display market (Transparent OLED Displays 2014) in which they forecast that the market will be dominated by LCDs in the next several years, but OLED participation will rapidly pick up. By 2019, transparent OLED display sales will reach almost $150 million, and this will grow to almost $700 million by 2021.

There are still some major challenges on the road to transparent OLEDs, but these issues are gradually being solved. The major challenges, according to Nanomarkets, are ITO replacement and excessive light loss compensation.

China-based Lonshine Technologies is developing new analog -smartwatch products that use a transparent OLED over a mechanical watch. There are two devices, the Halo 1 (a smartphone companion) and the Halo 2 (which includes 2G wireless and can work without a companion phone).

Both devices use the same transparent PMOLED that features a resolution of 96x96 and can display up to 256 colors. The watches are powered by an Intel XMM 2231 ARM chip (300Mhz), Android 2.3, 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. There's a 240 mAh battery (a 3150 mAh one on the Halo 2) that should last for three days.

Kia announced a new electric car, the 2015 Soul EV. The vehicle has a 109 bhp engine and a 27 kWh L-ion battery that gives it a range of 93 miles. This environmental friendly car uses 23 kg of plant-based interior plastics (made from cellulose and sugar cane base).

In the instrument cluster, the Soul EV uses a 3.5" OLED display. It provides information on the energy flow, charging time, ECO driving level and energy economy. It also provides a three-stage alert for the Soul EV’s State of Charge (SOC) - so you can quickly determine when it's time for charging.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) had some pretty interesting prototype OLED displays shown at the Touch Taiwan 2014 trade show last month. We do not have any information regarding how close are these prototypes to commercialization.

So first up is a flexible AMOLED display. This panel is 4.8" in size and 720x240 resolution (158 PPI). The company did not reveal any more technical details. The company also showed some simpler flexible PMOLED panels, demonstrating their sealing capabilities by immersing them under water (see image below).

Update: the first video was removed from YouTube and is no longer available

Winstar, a leading PMOLED producer from Taiwan, hosted a seminar in June 2014, and they gave two OLED lectures - describing their OLED products in the present and the future development expected from Winstar.

There's some interesting details in there. First of all, while Winstar is currently producing glass-based PMOLEDs, the company is also developing flexible PMOLED panels. One of the major challenges is encapsulation and Winstar is using ALD technology for this at the moment, developed in collaboration with ITRI.

LG's Lifeband Touch smart wearable fitness device is now shipping or $149.99 in the US. The Lifeband uses a small touch white PMOLED that can display incoming call and text information, when the band is paired to an iOS or ANdroid device. The Lifeband touch can also be paired with LG's Heart Rate Monitor earphones that measure signals from the inner ear to track heartbeats.

Meanwhile, Samsung reduced the price of the Gear Fit to only $143. At least if we consider the display, the Gear Fit is more exciting - it features a flexible (curved) 1.84" (432x128) Super AMOLED panel

Huawei launched their TalkBand B1 smart wearable device in February, made it available in China, but now it's finally coming to Europe too - Amazon.co.uk lists it for £99 and says it will ship on June 30. Hopefully it will launch in the US soon.

The TalkBand has a curved (flexible) 1.4" 128x16 PMOLED display, made by Futaba. This is Futaba's film OLED, and it's the first device to actually adopt these panels. It's great to finally see flexible PMOLEDs on the market. TDK Micro (bought by Futaba) has been showing flexible PMOLEDs since 2010, and it took them almost four years to actually bring those to market.

GeekAmmo launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that aims to develop a tiny Arduino computer with a built-in PMOLED display. The MicroView will be the first small Arduino that has a built-in display, so you do not need to connect it to a computer for output.

The Microview uses a ATmega328P CPU (16 Mhz), 32Kb of FLASH and a 64x48 blue PMOLED display. The inventors wanted to reach $25,000, but with 21 days to go, they already raised over $300,000 as this campaign got a lot of press and almost 4,000 backers.

Update: just after posting my article, Samsung annonced the Gear Fit, a fitness band with a 1.84" Super AMOLED panel. Perhaps my reasoning was all wrong, and high-resolution, color displays may take over this new market as well.

Passive Matrix OLEDs (PMOLEDs) use a simple driver, which restricts the resolution and efficiency of the display, but also enables it to be produced easily and relatively on the cheap. The first OLED displays on the market (in 1998) were PMOLED, made by Pioneer, used in car audio systems.

The PMOLED market grew in the past, up until 2006. Back then, the main application for those displays was the sub-display on clamshell phones. But then Apple launched the iPhone, and since then the clamshell design lost its popularity very quickly - and the PMOLED market is in decline ever since.

The SID Display Week, the world's leading display industry showcase is scheduled for June, but the organizers already published the list of papers to be presented in this show. Hiding in this long list of technical achievements and research projects are some interesting new OLED developments. So here's some of the achievements to be announced during the show (at no particular order).

TCL's China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) managed to fabricate a 7" QVGA (320x240) flexible PMOLED display. The display uses a thin PEN substrate, processed at Gen-4.5. The company also proposes a design for a 14" QVGA PMOLED panel. CSOT also developed a 31" Full-HD AMOLED panel that uses a IGZO backplane. The 31" direct-emission panel was produced on a Gen-4.5 glass substrate using FMM.