4D Systems (an Australian R&D company that supplies OLED displays) recently started to ship their first transparent OLED display, the uTOLED-20. Here's my hands-on review of this great little OLED panel.
Densitron is launching new PMOLED panels that feature higher lifetime than previous models. The company now offers yellow PMOLEDs that feature 100,000 hours lifetime at 100 nits and 150,000 hours at 80 nits. They are also offering PMOLED in different colors, and they say that their OLED panels lifetime is now three times longer than it was when they were first introduced.
Tianma was showing two AMOLED prototypes at SID: a 3.2" (320x480) and a 12.1" (1280x800). Those are direct-emission (side-by-side) panels built on an LTPS substrate, and they were looking rather good. These seem to be the same panels demonstrated in FPD china earlier this year.
The panels were produced at Tianma's pilot 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab in Shanghai. It was reported in 2010 that the pilot line's cost was $72 million (the Chinese government helped with $40 million in funding) and it is able to produce around 1,000 glass substrates in a month.
It was a pleasant surprise to see Hyundai LCD (or HYeLCD as they like to be called now) at SID 2012. I thought the company is no longer in business (mainly due to the fact that their web site appears to be down for months now). Anyway they did have a booth, showing several LCD and PMOLED panels.
The PMOLED panels on show included a monochrome (16 gray levels) 1.46" 128x128 panel, a full-color 1.12" 96x96 panel and a small monochrome 0.91" 128x32 panel.
Futaba says they have developed a new thin PMOLED display - in fact it's one seventh as thin as their existing PMOLEDs at 0.29 mm (Futaba's regular PMOLEDs are 2 mm thick). The new display is also much lighter: a 2.7" panel weights 1.3 grams. In order to make these new displays Futaba developed new materials and eliminated the hollow structure used to protect the OLED materials.
Futaba will begin mass producing the new displays towards the end of 2012. The new displays will cost about 50% more than Futaba's thicker panels.
RiTdisplay is a PMOLED producer based in Taiwan that has several production lines making PMOLED panels. A few years ago it was considered the world's largest PMOLED maker, although I now hear that due to financial problems the company shut down some of their PMOLED lines (this isn't confirmed though).
At SID 2012, RiTdisplay showed several PMOLED panels, and some 3.5" AMOLED panels. RiTdisplay is Ignis' production partner for its a-Si compensation technology, which basically enables a-Si to be used as a backplane for AMOLED panels (instead of LTPS or Oxide-TFT). This should enable cheaper AMOLEDs. You can read more about this technology at my Ignis-at-SID post.
Winstar (a Taiwan-based LCD, e-paper and PMOLED producer) released their OLED technology roadmap for 2012-2013:
It seems that Winstar is developing transparent OLEDs, apparently the technology will be ready in Q2 2013. They are most likely working on transparent PMOLED panels (just like Futaba is). Winstar is also developing OLED lighting panels - the technology will be ready towards the end of 2013.
OSD Displays announces a new 1.45" color PMOLED module (the OSD160128P0907-10) that features 160x128 resolution, a thin profile (1.6mm) and a light weight (3.6 grams). According to OSD, this is the first such PMOLED that offers a resolution larger than 128x128.
The OSD160128P907-10 is highly adaptable to customer designs supporting parallel RGB interfaces 6/16/18 bit configurations, CPU/MCU type interfaces of 8/16/18 bits in both i80 and 68xx standards, and even supports a 4-wire SPI mode. The display hardware terminates on a 35 conductor, 0.5mm pitch tail which is compatible with flex-to-board ZIF type connectors by customer systems.
OSD announced a new PMOLED module, the OSD2864P1097-10. It's a monochrome white 128x64 1.3" panel that features 50,000 hours lifetime, 10,000:1 contrast ratio and 178 degree viewing angles. It is available in two version - with and without an anti-glare polarizer (at no extra cost). The OSD12864P1097-10 is paired with an SSD1306 IC offering I2C, 3 wire SPI, 4 wire SPI, 8-bit68xx Parallel and 8-bit 80XX Parallel settings.
AUO unveiled a new 4.3" AMOLED panel offering 257ppi. The company actually said they "launched" the new product, but it seems that they aren't mass producing it yet (this will probably happen in early 2012). But the company is reportedly shipping samples already.
The company has also demonstrated a 6" transparent OLED display (with a transparency rate of over 35%), and a 4" Touch AMOLED display that features 30% less energy consumption compared to other AMOLED. We assume that this display includes an in-cell touch panel - similar to Samsung's Super AMOLED displays. AUO unveiled their AMOLED in-cell touch technology back in June 2010.
