Glass - Page 7

Nippon Electric Glass and Saint-Gobain established a new company called OLED Materials Solutions to develop, manufacture and market glass substrates with internal extraction layers for OLED Lighting panels.

NEG already developed several glass substrates for OLED lighting. The company is currently sampling their new HX-1 glass which is a high refractive index glass.

LG Chem announced today that they are going to cut the prices of their OLED panels at Q3 2014. LG Chem is aiming to cut their prices by about 60% (!) - from about $600/Klm to about $200/Klm. LG Chem will offer these prices at first to selected prices that are willing to "stimulate the market with mass-production of OLED luminaires".

LG Chem explains that this price drop was possible because the company changed the glass substrate and the encapsulation materials in their production process. This enables them to create thinner, light and cheaper panels without any effect on the performance. LG Chem will first upgrade and lower the price of their popular 100x100 mm and 320x110 mm panels, and later on they will upgrade all of their panels.

Fraunhofer COMEDD is looking to advance flexible OLED lighting device lifetime, and towards that goal the German institute developed flexible OLED lighting panels on flexible glass substrates. COMEDD reports that flexible glass can enable curved panels that has high OLED lifetime - much higher than can be obtained with polymer-based encapsulation and substrate technologies.

Fraunhofer developed those new panels on their own Roll-to-Roll R&D line in collaboration with Von Ardenne (on the development of process equipment) and Nippon Electric Glass (they provided the "G-Leaf" flexible glass rolls). The G-Leaf glass is less than 35 um thick and can be used in roll-to-roll processes.

DuPont developed new screen-printable nano-silver conductor ink that can be used to make grids and bus lines for OLED lighting panels. DuPont says that these materials are less expensive compared to materials currently used for such panels, and they offer a simpler manufacturing process.

DuPont estimates that these new inks will be commercially available next year. The inks provide extremely high conductivity and excellent adhesion even after substrate cleaning steps. They can be used on glass and flexible polymer substrates such as DuPont's own Kapton polyimide films and polyethylene naphthalate (PEN).

Tokyo Electron announced that it is now accepting orders for the Elius 2500 OLED inkjet printing system. This system can produce OLEDs on 8th gen glass substrates.

TEL started collaborating with Seiko Epson on OLED manufacturing technology in 2010. The companies signed an agreement to jointly-develop OLED display manufacturing technology that will integrate Epson's inkjet printing method and TEL's production equipment. So after about 3.5 years, we finally see the first product that resulted from this collaboration.

Panasonic demonstrated three new OLED lighting panels at a LED trade show in Tokyo. First up is a flexible panel - this is the first time Panasonic demonstrated a flexible OLED. They did not reveal any specification - beside the fact that it is only 0.4 mm thick.

The second panel is a 10x10 cm panel that offers a luminous efficiency of 100 lm/W. Panasonic already unveiled a 114 lm/W panel back in 2013 - but it was a lot smaller (1x1 cm). According to Tech-On, the panel is not very bright and is also rather yellowish in color and they suspect that the CRI is low. Panasonic says that the emphasis has been on efficiency for this panel, and they wouldn't reveal specifications such as lifetime, CRI, color temperature, etc.

LG Display posted a very interesting article explaining their flexible OLEDs, and giving some predictions (based on IHS DisplayBank estimates) about the flexible OLED market. A couple of months ago LG already stated that they see a very bright future for flexible OLEDs and they intend to take the lead in this emerging display market.

So first of all, LGD explains the structure of their flexible OLED panel (see below). It is based on a plastic (polyimide) substrate as we already know, and LG gives some more information about their Face Seal method which was discussed before but with very little details.

LG sees a bright future for flexible displays. In fact the company predicts that flexible smartphones will take-up 40% of the smartphone market in 2018. Samsung thinks the same, and they are basing their numbers on DisplaySearch - which means that LG is also probably actually quoting the same source.

LG Electronic's mobile product planning chief, Dr Ramchan Woo, says that "we are bored of flat" and that a flexible device is much more than just a flexible display. For example one of the key technologies in the G Flex is the flexible Stack & Folding battery made by LG Chem (here's a photo of the battery). Another key technology is the thin cover glass - and so we learn that this phone, similarly to Samsung's Galaxy Round also includes a cover glass, which explains why it is not truly "unbreakable".

The Galaxy Round, Samsung's first flexible OLED device sports a 5.7" Full-HD (386 PPI) Super AMOLED display. It was released a few weeks ago in Korea but there were several question marks regarding this display - is it based on a plastic substrate? is it a YOUM display? is the display unbreakable? And does it make sense to have a curved display?

My friend Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate managed to get hold on this phone and put it through extensive testing like he always does. In his post Raymond actually answers all this questions. So first of all, Raymond confirms that the display is indeed a flexible OLED built on a plastic substrate. But samsung used a cover glass to protect it. This means that it is not an unbreakable display, which explains why Samsung does not brand it as a YOUM display.

Samsung posted their quarterly results for Q3 2013 - a record operation profit of $9.6 billion from sales of $55 billion. Net profit was over $7.7 billion. Smartphone sales growth is slowing, but Samsung's business was booster but memory chip profits and cheaper smartphone sales (what they call mass-market products).

Regarding OLEDs, the company says that high end smartphone OLED panel sales increased. This includes newer products such as the Note 3. For Q4 2013, the company plans to enhance OLED market leadership by "improving differentiated product offerings such as 5.7 FHD (Glass & Curved)".