Glass - Page 8

Corning and Samsung announced a complicated deal today - Corning will buy out Samsung Display's stake in their LCD glass joint venture (Samsung Corning Precision Materials, or SCP). In exchange, Samsung will receive convertible preferred shares in Corning that are valued at $1.9 billion and will acquire more shares for $400 million. If Samsung converts all these shares, they will own 7.4% of Corning.

Corning estimates that this move will add about $2 billion in annual sales and about $350 million in profit. As part of the deal, the two companies signed a new 10-year LCD display glass supply agreement. Corning will also buy other minority shareholders in SCP for about $300 million, and will also pay a special $1.4 billion dividend payment to SDC.

Update: It seems to me that Samsung did clarify this issue saying that this is not a glass-based display, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

On October 9th, Samsung launched the world's first device with a flexible OLED display, the Galaxy Round smartphone - with it's curved 5.7" Full-HD flexible Super AMOLED. Strangely Samsung does not refer to this display as a YOUM display, which is the brand name for plastic-based OLEDs they launched at CES 2013.

In their PR, Samsung also never mentioned that this display is "unbreakable" - which is one of the biggest advantages of plastic-based OLEDs. Samsung's design is also much less exciting that the design prototypes they unveiled at CES that used a YOUM display. A couple of weeks ago I thought that perhaps this display uses a glass substrate and not a plastic one, which will explain everything. I checked with my sources and they said that it is using plastic and this is a YOUM display.

Corning recently announced the new second-gen Lotus XT high-performance glass suitable for OLED displays. The company has been supplying glass substrate and cover glass for OLED displays for years now. Now Corning was kind enough to participate in a Q&A session here on OLED-Info to better explain how they see the OLED market and what the future holds for Corning and OLEDs.

We talked to two Corning executives. John Bayne is Corning's High Performance Displays VP and General Manager, while Harrison Smookler is the commercial director and program manager of Willow Glass Substrates (flexible glass).

Tianma selected Corning's Lotus XT Glass for its line of LTPS panels. Tianma is currently producing LCDs but will hopefully start AMOLED production in 2014.

Tianma says they chose Lotus XG Glass because of the advanced properties of the glass. The company’s LTPS line is located in Xiamen, China, and has a capacity of 30,000 TFT modules, and more than 30,000 color-filter modules per month. It is the first Gen 5.5 LTPS line in China.

Pioneer developed new flexible PMOLED panels. Those monochrome panels are bendable (curvature radius : 20mm) and very slim (0.15 mm thick) and light (0.04 g/cm²). Those flexible OLEDs use an ultra-thin glass substrate:

Pioneer wouldn't reveal any more details (such as when they expect to start producing such panels). But if you look at the text on the display, it seems that Pioneer expects to finish development by next year.

Corning announced today that it has been collaborating with AUO on high-performance displays, and AUO's new 5" HD720 AMOLED panels shown at Touch Taiwan use Corning's Lotus Glass. As far as I understand, they are using Corning's latest generation Lotus Glass XT.

AUO says they selected the Lotus Glass platform because of the glass substrate's outstanding thermal and dimensional stability, which facilitates efficient panel manufacturing during rigorous, high-temperature processing.

Researchers from Germany's TU Darmstadt University developed new glowing fibers by coating them with white OLED emitters. They call their technology reproducible rotational coating and they envision all sorts of possibilities in the area of smart textiles, as in the future it'll be possible to coat all sorts of semiconductor components (such as transistors or solar cells) on fibers.

The researchers use vacuum deposition and small-molecule OLEDs for this process. They deposit seven different layers but the whole OLED is just 200 nanometers thick. OLEDs require a very smooth substrate and so currently they use glass fibers - which aren't really useful in wearable applications as they are too brittle to be woven into textiles. They are now starting to experiment with polymer-coated glass fibers that may be flexible enough to be used in textiles.

Audi, Philips, Automotive Lighting, Merck and the University of Cologne successfully concluded an OLED research project (called OLED 3D), and developed the world's first large-area 3D OLED car rear lighting panels and installed a prototype on an Audi TT.

A 3D OLED means that the OLEDs have a curved surface - not just in one direction. These are glass based panels. It's not flexible glass (like Corning's Willow glass), it's the regular glass Philips are using in their regular OLEDs, but curved. The material used (made by Merck) are soluble, and the production process is described as "web printing" by Philips (I'm not sure what is meant by that).

Corning announced their new, second-generation Lotus XT glass for high performance displays (LCDs and OLEDs). The Lotus XT offers better dimensional stability and can withstand higher temperatures compared to the previous version.

The new glass features better total-pitch variation (the distance features move during panel processing). All this means that using the new glass shall increase production yields and result in more precise manufacturing. The new glass can be used as substrate for LTPS and Oxide-TFT backplanes.

The OLED Association posted an interesting article today in which they say that Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note 3 phone (phablet?) will use a YOUM display (a plastic-based unbreakable flexible OLED). Samsung will unveil the new phone at IFA 2013 (September) and will launch it in Q4 2013.

Galaxy Note II

Samsung YOUM displays use a plastic (Polyimide) substrate, an LTPS backplane, direct-emission RGB patterned OLED sub pixels and thin-film encapsulation (using Vitex's multi-layer technology). It's not known yet what the size and resolution of this particular display, but the OLED-A estimates it will be at least 5.9" in size, but probably will not achieve Full-HD resolution. The Note 3 will also not use a curved display.