Direct emission - Page 9

SID 2013, the world's most prominent display conference will take place next month (May 19, in Vancouver, Canada) - and they now published some technical papars that will be discussed during the conference. And there's some interesting stuff in there.

First up is AU Optronics paper, describing how the company developed the world's largest OLED panel: a 65" direct-emission Oxide TFT one. This panel, that was produced using an FMM process, features a long-range threshold voltage uniformity of 0.34 V, and the dam and fill encapsulation process is simple and highly stable.

Rappler, a Philippines-based news site posted an interesting report from Samsung's Southeast Asia Forum (which took place in Jakarta, Indonesia), claiming that Samsung's F9500 55" Real OLED TV will launch in Asia in August 2013, for the price of 750,000 Philippine Pesos - or just over $18,000!

That's a really high price even for an OLED TV, considering that LG's 55" OLED TV costs $10,000 in Korea. I find it hard to believe that Samsung will charge such a premium over LG's TV (DisplayMate actually says that the quality of LG's OLED panel is superior). Samsung is using direct-emission RGB OLED subpixels, which are more complicated to make compared to LG's WRGB structure. Samsung's TV also features MultiView 3D.

We all know that LG Display managed to beat Samsung and be the first company to actually produce and ship OLED TV panels. Today the Korea Times claims that Samsung decided to adopt LG's own WRGB architecture and the company will start producing such OLED TV panels towards the end of 2013.

Samsung and LG have taken different paths towards large sized OLED panels. Samsung is using an LTPS backplane and a direct-emission (or side by side) architecture which means that there are three sub pixels for each pixel (red, green and blue). Samsung's design does not use any color filters. LG's OLED panels use an Oxide-TFT backplane and white sub pixels with color filters (this is called WRGB because there are four subpixels: red, green, blue and one white, non filtered. Is is also referred to sometimes as WOLED-CF).

Samsung announced a new OLED TV, the F9500 (full model number: KN55F9500). Samsung now calls this a "Real OLED TV" as it uses direct-emission RGB OLED subpixels. The panel is a Full-HD panel, 55" in size. This TV features voice and hand UI recognition, smart TV features (the engine is 1.35Ghz quad-core CPU), new picture processing technologies and active-shutter 3D (with Multi-View support via optional $99 3D headphone glasses).

Samsung OLED TVs at SID 2012

It's disappointing that Samsung wouldn't reveal any definite launch dates and prices. They do aim to start shipping in 2013 though. So now it seems that LG will indeed be the first one to ship OLED TVs - in fact they'll do so next month in Korea. Samsung says that the direct emission OLED structure is more efficient and better looking than LG's WRGB structure, but it seems that the WRGB structure is indeed easier to fabricate, which is obviously an advantage.

Correction: according to our trusted source, this report was wrong - Tianma did not develop such an AMOLED display...

According to reports, Tianma developed a 4.5" Full-HD AMOLED panel. In a recent trial production run the company managed to produce the panels (in addition to 3.2" AMOLED panels as well). Tianma may be possible to mass produce these panels in 2013 - with an aim to become one of the world's leading smartphone display makers.

The company has a pilot 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab in Shanghai (it was reported in 2010 that the pilot line's cost was $72 million and the Chinese government helped with $40 million in funding). The pilot fab is able to produce around 1,000 glass substrates in a month. Tianma's prototype panels shown at SID (in June) used a direct-emission architecture and an LTPS backplane. I assume the new panels use the same architecture.

eMagin reported their Q3 2012 financial results today. Revenues were $7.5 million (Q3 2011 revenues were $8.3, the decrease is because of lower R&D contract revenue). Net income was $340,000. eMagin has $16.6 million in cash and the company maintains their 2012 revenue guidance of $30-$34 million.

Regarding the camera electronic viewfinder project, eMagin says that they shipped some first prototypes, and are implementing further improvements - mainly a 67% increase in color gamut. This means that the current crop of digital cameras with OLED XGA viewfinders (the Fujifilm X-E1, the panasonic GH3 and Sony's A99, NEX-6 and the RX-1.) do not use eMagin's microdisplays (we actually assumed thus back when the cameras were announced). In fact eMagin says that they hope to ship the microdisplays during Q1 2013, and the product will probably ship in Q2. This is a high-end camera, but eMagin says these kinds of cameras can sell about 100,000 units a year.

eMagin reported their Q2 2012 results with record revenues of $8.6 million (a 15.3% increase over Q2 2011). Net income was $577,000. eMagin has about $13.3 million in cash. During Q2 the company bought back 125,000 shares (average price $2.95).

New deposition machine

Andrew Sculley (eMagin's CEO) says that eMagin have finally started to produce microdisplays on their new deposition machine. The machine isn't yet fully optimized, and they are also producing on their older Satella machine. eMagin says that once the new machine is fully optimized (they need to automate a certain process still), capacity will grow 10-fold, and the displays will have better uniformity - which will increase quality and yields.

DisplaySearch says that the AMOLED market is expected to grow almost tenfold from 2012 (2.3 million square meters) to 2016 (22 million square meters). DisplaySearch are basing their forecast on planned investments, and they say that most of the capacity increase will be driven by OLED TV production.

While Samsung has been successful in improving yields for small OLED production (to an almost-LCD level) and thus enabling an only 30% premium over LCDs, producing large OLED panels is still very expensive - mainly due to low yields and high material costs.

Chimei Innolux had a nice booth at SID 2012, and I was given a nice tour of the booth by their PR people (who allowed me to take photos and videos even though they had a sign saying it ain't allowed). CMI's marketing guys were also kind enough to answer a few questions I had on their OLED program.

A few days before SID CMI announced that it will begin to produce 3.4" and 4.3" panels by Q4 2012. At SID I learned that the first OLED fab to go online is actually an old TPO/Toppoly 3.5-Gen fab. The panels will use LTPS backplane and will both feature 960x540 resolution (so it's 326 ppi on the 3.4" panel and 257 ppi on the 3.4" panel). CMI says that their technology is "ready" for 4.5" 720p (326ppi) panels as well.

One of the first companies I wanted to visit at SID was eMagin. I met the company's CEO (Andrew G. Sculley) for the first time, and he gave me a very nice introduction to the company's current business and future plans. I'll try and summarize that meeting and eMagin's booth in this post.

eMagin is now in the final testing and qualification stages of its new deposition and seal machines. Those new machines are expected to increase capacity and improve yields. It will also free up the current machines for R&D, which seems to be very important for Andrew.