Glass - Page 6

Corning announced that Samsung Display adopted the company's Lotus NXT glass as its OLED panel substrate. The Lotus NXT glass was announced in June 2015, and Corning reveals that that Samsung already adopted those substrates for the Galaxy Note 5's 5.7" Quad-HD (2560x1440, 518PPI) Super AMOLED display. The Note 5 was released in August 2015.

Lotus NXT improves the 2nd-gen XT glass (launched in May 2013) with lower total pitch variations. The new glass has improved stability, and better total pitch variation performance. According to Corning, this enables display makers to produce more efficient displays (up to 15% lower power consumption), or higher resolution displays (by up to 100 additional pixels per inch).

IDTechEx Research says that the flexible encapsulation (barrier) market for flexible devices (such as displays, but not only) will reach over $184 by 2020. IDTechEx sees next-gen single-layer encapsulation solutions to capture a part of the market in the future.

IDTechEx also takes a look at two specific technologies. Flexible glass is not seen to become the solution of choice in the short to medium terms due to the fragility and the fact that it cannot be stressed out of axis - and extreme flexibility can be a problem. Flexible glass is seen to be the best choice for a substrate material, though.

Corning announced an updated version of their high-performance (LCD and OLED) display glass substrate, the Lotus NXT Glass. The new glass improves the 2nd-gen XT glass (launched exactly two years ago in May 2013) with lower total pitch variations.

Corning Lotus XT

The new glass has improved stability, and better total pitch variation performance. According to Corning, this enables display makers to produce more efficient displays (up to 15% lower power consumption), or higher resolution displays (by up to 100 additional pixels per inch). The Lotus NXT can also improve display production yields - by up to 1.5%. It's not quite clear if these numbers refer to the improvement over Lotus XT or other glass substrates on the market

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is launching a new project called KONFECT that aims to develop flexible OLED glass for OLED applications. BMBF is awarded €5.6 million towards the three-year project that seeks to refine windable glass through lamination with functional adhesive tapes and by applying special functional layers.

The project consortium includes three partners - Schott, tesa and VON ARDENNE. Schott and tesa will develop reliable encapsulation by combining Schott's flexible glass with tesa's barrier tape while Von Ardenne will developing a vacuum coating system specifically for roll-to-roll (R2R) coating of flexible glasses.

Corning and OLEDWorks signed a collaborative agreement to develop flexible and conformable OLED lighting solutions using Corning's flexible Willow Glass as an integrated substrate and barrier.

Corning's Willow Glass will not just enable the panels to be flexible - the glass also integrates Corning's light extraction technology that will (according to OLEDWorks) enable them to double the light output from the panels.

Two new technologies seem to dominate the LCD TV market in CES 2015. First up are quantum dots TVs - which are LED backlit LCDs that include a QD film that enhances the TV's color gamut, efficiency, brightness and contrast. Sony has been producing QD TVs for almost two years, but this year we have new launches from Samsung, LG, Philips, TCL and others.

Samsung SUHD (credit: Sri Peruvemba, Marketer International)

These new wave of QD TVs are Cadmium-free, which was one of the major stumbling block towards real QD commercialization. The major advantage of QD TVs is the enhanced color gamut, which is even larger than the color gamut currently offered by OLED TVs (although LG promises their OLEDs will catch up soon). LG still considers OLEDs as their future TV technology, and Merck also says that quantum-dots are not a real game changer (unlike OLEDs).

Samsung hosted an investors forum in NY a few days ago, and it is reported that much of Samsung's focus was on OLED technologies. As we already reported, Samsung Electronics announced that flexible OLED is one of its 3 areas of future growth (especially as they struggle to increase high-end mobile phone sales), and during the conference the company revealed some interesting information and prototypes.

Foldable OLED concept (2013)

So first up were two new foldable OLED prototypes - a 5.5" (WQXGA, 2048x1526, 464 PPI) panel that folds in half and a 10" tri-foldable AMOLED (Full-HD, 218 PPI).

Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) developed the world's thinnest glass plate (only 30 um thick). The G-Leaf glass can be used as a substrate for flexible OLED displays, and NEG demonstrated a flexible OLED that is only 90 um thick (sandwiched between two G-Leaf sheets).

NEG uses their "overflow method" technology to manufacture the new glass plates. Reportedly the glass feels like a plastic film and does not break even when crumpled (see photo below).

Researchers from the University of Tokyo developed a new technology to bond polyimide films to glass so it can easily be peeled off by applying heat. Polyimide is widely used today as a flexible OLED substrate, which is indeed produced on glass and then de-laminated at the end of the deposition process. This is an expensive process today (which requires a laser) with low yields.

The new bonding technology (which they call surface activated bonding) makes it easier to remove the polyimide film. In the new process an argon io beam is used to remove the oxide and adsorption films and flatten the surfaces. A 5-20 nm thick silicon layer is formed between the glass and the polyimide by ion beam sputtering. An iron adhesion layer (1 nm thick) is formed on the silicon to reinforce the bonding.

Samsung's newest phones, the Galaxy Note 4 and Note 4 Edge haven't been released yet, but my friend Raymond Soneira already got his hands on two pre-release production devices and posted the first review of these new AMOLED smartphones.

So first of all, the regular Note 4 displays. Ray's conclusion? This is the best mobile display ever tested at DisplayMate, surpassing the AMOLED used in the GS5 and the GN3, and also the one used in the Galaxy Tab S. The GN4 display improves on previous generations in the display density (PPI), color accurate, peak brightness (750 cd/m²) and screen readability in high ambient light and the display power efficiency.