Patents - Page 9

In January 2014, Global OLED Technology (GOT) filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against eMagin for breach of license agreement.

Today eMagin announced that it entered into a settlement agreement with Global OLED Technology. The two companies terminated the original patent license agreement in exchange for mutual releases and the payment by eMagin of a one-time, undisclosed settlement amount. GOT will dismiss its lawsuit and eMagin will not pay any royalties to GOT (their current product offering does not incorporate any GOT IP.

Visionox developed a new RGB pixel arrangement for OLED technologies that allowed them to reach 570 PPI. The company refers to this new technology as Z-Type arrangement and it includes 3 sub-pixels (RGB) per pixel (unlike Samsung's Pentile displays). The sub-pixels are densely packed (the aperture ratio seems very high) in a way that does not suffer from jagged edges.

Visionox told me that they cannot yet say when such displays can be commercialized, as there are still manufacturing challenges to overcome. In the meanwhile the company applied for both Chinese and international patents.

The European Patent Office (EPO) ruled to upheld one of Universal Display's key PHOLED patents (EPO#EP1394870). This patent, which UDC refers to as EP870, details an OLED in which the emissive layer contains phosphorescent dopant compounds. This patent corresponds to the company's US'238 patent.

In November 2013, the Japanese High Court decided to validate UDC's claims in Japanese patent #4511024, which is a counterpart patent to the EP870 and US238 patents. Later in November, The EPO revoked one of UDC's basic phosphorescent OLED patents, EPO#1449238. The opposing parties included Sumitomo Chemical, Merck and BASF.

Universal Display Corporation (UDC) is one of the most known OLED company, involved with OLED IP, OLED phopshorescent materials, innovations on flexible OLEDs, production processes and more. As the most prominent public OLED company, the company is interesting to many investors and analysts.

Last year UDC hired Darice Liu to handle communications and investor relations. Darice was kind enough to answer a few questions I had regarding UDC's technology and business. These are interesting times for UDC as the OLED market is growing quickly, OLED TVs and flexible OLEDs are finally appearing on the market, but on the other hand the company is being faced with patent litigation and criticism from some investors (whom I shall not name).

Transparent OLEDs are being developed for years now - and some small PMOLED ones are being produced in low volume. But besides a few novelty feature phones, we haven't yet seen a real application for those kinds of displays. Samsung and others have been teasing us with those concept transparent flexible OLED light tablets, but finding real world applications for transparent displays isn't that easy.

Samsung now filed a patent that describes a digital camera that uses a transparent display. The screen is located to the side of the camera which makes it rather wide. What it is good for? According to the patent filing, the idea is that by using a transparent display, the subject of the photo can look at the one taking the photo - and so they can have direct eye-contact.

Universal Display announced that Kaneka signed an OLED technology license agreement. UDC granted license rights to manufacture and sell phosphorescent OLED lighting products. Kaneka will use UDC's PHOLED materials in their OLED lighting devices.

Kaneka has been developing OLED lighting panels for a long time. The company had plans to start offering OLED panels back in 2011, and showed dimmable 20 lm/w panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). Back in 2011 the company said those panels cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and they hoped this will drop to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020.

Global OLED Technology (GOT) filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against eMagin for breach of license agreement. eMagin has been a licensee of GOT's patent portfolio (which originated at Kodak) since 1999.

GOT says that eMagin breached its patent license agreement by failing to pay annual minimum royalty payments, neglecting to report or pay royalties for the sales of licensed products, and breaching certain confidentiality obligations.

LG already announced it will be showing several new OLED TV models at CES (including new 55", 65" and 77" models), but today at CES the company unveiled a bendable 77" 4K OLED. As was speculated last month, this panel can change from flat to curved using a "combination of water and motors" (whatever that means).

Engadget says the new TV is gorgeous. They were told by LG that they actually plan to ship this TV to the US soon - at H2 2014 or maybe at the beginning of 2015. It'll be interesting to see how all this bending effects the OLED structure. The TV anyway moves 7.5 cm to bend (it's eight centimeters narrower in total at full curve).

Apple has busy patenting several new OLED and flexible display patents lately. In June 2012 the company filed for a new patent in Europe that describes several new technologies for a future iPhone device - mainly a wraparound flexible transparent display that enables new form factors, aided with an alumina powder liquid-metal process.

The main invention is an electronic device that has a 'hollow display cover structure'. The device is like a long tube (or cylinder, or other shapes) that has a wraparound transparent flexible display. Apple also describes some applications that can take advantage of these new displays and designs - a stock ticker, gaming, news, and more.

Apple continues to file patents for new OLED technologies - a few days ago the USPTO unveiled a new patent that describes OLED displays with integrated thermal sensors. The idea is that OLED change their color and brightness as the temperature changes - they get dimmer when they are hot. This mostly effect red OLEDs. If you measure the heat of different areas in the screen (which may get warmer because they are close to a radio transmitter for example) you can compensate and get more accurate colors.

Apple's patent describes a system that integrates the sensors into the display itself, and these sensors can be used to check the temperature of different zones in the display - or even each individual pixel. A software controller is used to determine how much compensation is required for each OLED pixel.