AUO is still on track to start producing AMOLED displays soon, but the company's chairman KY Lee said today that they are still need to reduce the material cost and improve the efficiency of thier panels.
Yesterday we posted Ecosummit TV's video interview with Novaled's co-founder and chief scientist, and today we found another great interview, this time with Harry Boehme, Novaled's CFO. Harry confirms that the company had €11.2 million in revenues in 2010. He also reveals that Novaled are selling materials to a large OLED display maker in Asia - which is Samsung (while not saying this specifically due to NDA, harry admits that they are selling to the 'only AMOLED maker').
Harry also discusses Novaled's technology and markets (they target OLED displays, OLED lighting and organic PV) and estimates that OLEDs will have a 20% share in the flat-panel display market within 5 years. The interview also includes a short visit to Novaled's chemistry lab with with Dr. Mike Zoellner, a project leader.
Samsung is showing a new 46" transparent LCD display that is so efficient it can run from a small solar panel at ambient light. The panel supports Full-HD resolution (1080p) and offers ten-finger multitouch surface. Samsung plans to commercialize this technology 'soon':
Kaneka announced that it will start accepting orders for OLED lighting panels on March 22nd, 2011 in Japan (and later in April in Europe). Kaneka will offer OLED square panels in five colors (warm white, red, orange, blue and green). The panels will be dimmable (in the range from 1,000cd/m2 to 5,000cd/m2).
Kaneka's OLED panels will cost around ¥2 million (approx $24,000) per square meter - and the company believes that the price will drop to ¥200,000 ($2,400) next year and to ¥50,000 ($600) or less by 2020. Production capacity in 2011 will be 10,000m2 - and this will grow to 100,000m2 in 2015. Kaneka panels will not be very efficient - around 20lm/W and will offer around 10,000 hours lifetime. But the company plans to improve this to about 60lm/W and 25,000 by 2014.
Update: We have some new information about Samsung's AMOLED manufacturing process. It turns out that they plan to soon move to a laser-based method (LITI) from the currently-used shadow-mask method (FMM). This will allows them to achieve 300ppi or more...
Earlier today we posted about the Super AMOLED plus resolution - and now we got our answer. It turns out that my calculations about the pentile matrix were incorrect - it fact it uses 2 sub-pixels for each pixel while a 'real' RGB matrix (or Real-Stripe as Samsung calls it) uses 3 sub-pixels for each pixels - and here's your 50% increase. Here's Samsung's own image showing the difference:
It also turns out that a Real-Stripe matrix also takes up more space per pixel. This explains why a 4.3" display that uses Real-Stripe has the same resolution as a 4" with a penTile matrix. But this display should actually be clearer because of the added sub-pixels and better matrix design.
Fujitec is showing cylindrical (tubular) OLED lighting panels and OLED lighting processing equipment. The OLED panels are either blue, red or green, 70mm diameter and 80mm in length. The luminance is 100cd/m2 for red or blue and 1000cd/m2 for green - which also features 24lm/W efficacy level. The lifetime is just 100 hours currently.
According to the company by middle 2011 they will be able to produce white-color panels (45mm diameter, 70mm in length) featuring 20lm/W at 1000 hours lifetime. The aim of their current project is to reach a white OLED at 30mm diameter and 200mm length, 30lm/W and 10,000 hours of lifetime.
Rohm developed a new (2nd-generation) OLED lighting panel that uses a red phosphorescent material. The new material results in a more efficient device - about
25-30lm/W, up from about 11lm/W in their first-generation all-fluorescent device.
Lumiotec (which is partly owned by Rohm) will start producing these new panels in "volume" within a few days (Lumiotec reported earlier that it will make around 60,000 panels a year). The new panel's size is 145x145mm (the same size of Lumiotec's older panels) and will cost ¥30,000 (about $365) - which is cheaper than Lumiotec's first-gen panels (the whole development kit used to cost The kit costs ¥84,000 - about $930). Lumiotec will also introduce other shapes and sizes. Here's our review of Lumiotec's older OLED Lighting panels.
A few weeks ago LG showed a new bright display and a new flagship phone codenamed "B". Now they have officially announced this new display called NOVA (which is based on LCD technology). LG claims that NOVA displays are extremely bright (700 nits) but also very efficient - even more so than OLEDs. In fact LG says that an AMOLED will consume twice as much power to display a full white screen (but we already know that AMOLEDs are less efficient than even regular LCDs on white screens). NOVA displays are also highly readable under direct sunlight.
LG also announced the Optimus Black Android (v2.2) phone which has a 4" NOVA display and will ship sometimes during the first half of 2011. LG says that the Optimus Black will be the world's slimmest smart phone (at 9.2mm).
Philips has transformed the Business Center OLED Lighting into a Global Business Unit OLED. They tell us that this emphasizes the importance of OLEDs within Philips. Kristin Knappstein, Head of Business Creation in the OLED unit has kindly agreed to answer a few questions we had.
Q: Hi Kristin, and thanks for your time. You have launched the first Lumiblade panels back in 2009. How's the response so far?
The first Lumiblade panels were already available in 2008 through our Technology kit, which was very well sought after.
Since then we have had constant request for panels in all shapes and sizes. Today, people not only can order from from our webshop a wide array of standard panels which are delivered in our Lumiblade Experience Kit but also our Lumiblade modules and moreover Lumiblades of individual shapes and sizes by contacting us.
Reactions have been very positive and inspiring to us. General statements by our customers are that it is good to have a brand new technology accessible the way we as Philips give access to it. As for a customer driven company it is our strategy to have this feedback in order to align our products with the customer needs.
Google has released the new Android v2.3 (Gingerbread). One of the updates is a new user interface (UI) - which seems to use more blacks. There are reports that this is so intentionally to take advantage of AMOLED displays (who consume no power on black pixels).
Google Nexus-S
This is not really surprising. It seems that AMOLED is slowly taking over the high-end smartphone market (and Google themselves chose an AMOLED for the Nexus-S phone. Or at least in some versions). Come July 2011, when Samsung's new Gen-5.5 plant (with 10X the capacity of their current plant) begins to produce AMOLEDs - and we're sure to see much more Android phones with AMOLEDs.
