Direct emission - Page 6

During an investor conference call, Universal Display revealed some new details on LG Display's flexible OLED program. According to UDC, LGD's current production capacity in its 4.5-Gen fab is 14,000 monthly substrates, more than double its capacity (6,000 substrates/month) that was reported in the middle of 2014.

LGD indeed said they expect to double their capacity towards the end of 2014, and that's great news. Some of that capacity will go to LG's own flexible products (such as the G Flex 2 and the G Watch R) - and reportedly also to support Apple's Watch which will launch in April.

In July eMagin announced they expect to receive a number of new R&D contracts, and now the company announced three new R&D project wins, worth a total of $6.8 million.

The first project is a $1.1 million contract over 15 months to further enhance the brightness of eMagin's ultra-high-brightness full-color microdisplay. The second project ($4.9 million, 30 months) and the third ($800,000 over 11 months) involved a new manufacturing technology that eMagin will detail in the near future.

CNet posted an interesting interview with LG's Global Communication Director, Ken Hong. Ken says that their OLED TV production yields are over 80% now - and it's all thanks to the WRGB technology they bought originally from Kodak. Ken says that LG has a large lead over competitors - and they do not expect anyone to catch up for at least 2-3 years.

Ken further says that consumers are ready for OLED TVs now. He says that other makers cannot produce OLED TVs with reasonable yields and this is why they say consumers are not ready. At the current price point, LG's job is to educate consumers why they should spend a premium on OLED technology.

eMagin, the OLED microdisplay maker, reported their financial results for Q2 2014. Revenues were $7 million (the same as in Q2 2013), while net loss was $1 million (the same again as in Q2 2013).

eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

While the company's financial results are still not very impressive, they do report significant advances in their R&D programs, mainly for ultra high-brightness displays and direct-patterned panels. In the near term, they hope that new R&D projects will help them increase revenues. In the long term, they seem certain that the advantages of direct-emission displays will enable them to achieve design wins in future commercial wearable devices such as HMDs.

Since they launched the world's first OLED TV in August 2013, LG managed to slash the price from $14,999 to about $4,000 (currently the EA9800 costs $4,299 in Amazon.com). We all hope LG will continue to lower the price, obviously, so it's good to hear that LGD's Byeonggyu Roh says that they will continue to reduce the cost of their OLED TV panel production.

According to UBI Research, LGD ultimate goal is to reach a price premium of only 10% over LCDs. LG needs to lower the costs across the board - taking advantage of existing LCD lines and equipment, optimizing the thickness of all th display layers (TFT, organic materials and encapsulation), improving the production process times and more.

eMagin demonstrate an ultra-high brightness full-color direct-patterned (DPD) OLED microdisplay. The so called OLED-ULT is 30 times brighter than the company's current largest-selling display, and it's 5 times more power efficient. eMagin says they are already shipping demonstrators to key customers - for applications such as aviation head mounted displays, smart glasses, and commercial augmented reality applications.

It will probably take a while for the company to actually commercialize those displays. eMagin is developing DPD panels since 2012 at least - it's not an easy process. Currently all OLED microdisplays on the market use color-filters on top of white OLED subpixels, and a direct-patterned microdisplay is much more efficient. The Fraunhofer COMEDD is also developing DPD OLEDs.

eMagin reported their financial results for Q1 2014. Revenues for the OLED microdisplay maker in the quarter were $6.3 million (down from $8.5 million in Q1 2013, but up from $6.1 million Q4 2013). The company shipped fewer units and also saw a decrease in the average selling price. Net loss in the quarter was $1.6 million (down from a net income of $205,000 in Q1 2013). eMagin has $8.3 million in cash, down from $11 million in the end of 2013.

eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

eMagin says the the lower revenues were mostly because of the stop order from three customers regarding the wire bond issue. This issue was partially solved. Shipments to one of the customers already resumed last month, and the company expects to resume shipment to the second customer in late June and to the third customer in late July.

Fraunhofer COMEDD collaborated with Orthogonal Inc to develop a new approach for OLED micro-structuring. The new patented technology, called Orthogonal Photolithography allows direct patterning of organic material on CMOS-backplanes.

This technology can enable high-brightness (5000 cd/m²) high-resolution OLED microdisplays. This is because it can be used to create direct-emission OLED microdisplays. All current microdipslays on the market use white OLED subpixels with color filters. Fraunhofer is also developing direct-emission OLED microdisplays using flash-mask-transfer-lithography (FMTL) technology.

So CES 2014 is now over, and one thing is certain - at least in that event, LG is making a much stronger push into OLED TVs than their arch rival Samsung. While Samsung only showed new 55" bendable 4K OLED prototypes, LG showed many prototypes and two new products, including a 77" curved 4K OLED TV that they plan to launch soon for $29,999.

But it seems that it's not just about TVs on display at CES. A Samsung visual-display VP says that there are significant OLED manufacturing issues and they only expect cheap OLED TVs to enter the market in 3 or 4 years. LG on the other hand sees a "rapid shift into OLED TVs". The market will remain small in 2014 (30,000 to 50,000 units) but LG expects the market to ramp up quickly.

Taiwan has a large display industry, but in recent years it seems that it is lagging behind Korea, Japan and China in AMOLED technologies. We asked a local industry expert to check out the three main Taiwanese AMOLED companies (AUO, Innolux and RiTDisplay), and now we post on his updates.

AUO

As we reported already, AUO started producing AMOLEDs in their 4.5-Gen fab in Singapore after years of delays. According to our source, AUO is actually only producing samples. Those 5" 720p (295 ppi) panel samples have been been submitted to a company based in China. Earlier reports suggested AUO is going to supply HTC and Sony but it appears these two companies will keep using LCDs for now.