PPI - Page 17

LG Display had a very big booth at SID 2012, showing lot's of displays. The main item on show was the 55" OLED TV panel, but all the rest of the displays were LCDs. As I said in my first post from SID, LG's OLED TVs stunning with great colors, amazing contrast and excellent 3D effects. Unlike Samsung, LGD had only one TV on show, showing 2D and 3D convent sequentially (the 3D uses passive glasses). LG's OLED panel is extremely thin - 4 mm, you can hardly see it looking from the side.

During LG Display's keynote speech, they made some very interesting comments about their OLED technology and business. First of all, LG expects OLED TVs to grow at 320% (CAGR) from 2012 to 2016, reaching 11% of the TV market, while the rest of the market - LCD/PDP/CRT will only grow at 1.1%. OLED TV is the "next evolution" of TV technology.

At SID 2012 Sony presented a technical paper describing its offset printing technology which enables high resolution OLED panels. In fact Sony claims this technology could produce 500ppi OLED panels.

Sony's printing technology has three steps. In step 1, the ink is coated on a flat blanket by slit coating. In step 2, the stamp and the blanket are then placed in contact and subsequently separated. The ink in contact with the stamp detaches from the blanket, since the stamp has a higher surface energy than the blanket. The stamp has the reverse pattern. As a result, the desired print pattern remains on the blanket.

The UK's Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is funding 43 new projects under the ‘Technology Inspired Innovation’ R&D competition. Plastic Logic will participate in two of these projects, both related to OLEDs. The first one aims to develop new high-performance amorphous polymers, and the second called ROBOLED aims to integrate organic thin-film transistors (TFTs) backplanes with OLED frontplanes. Plastic Logic is collaborating with the UK's CPI on this project.

Back in January 2011 Plastic Logic received $700 million in funding from Russia's RusNano fund - to build a mass-production factory for thin, light and flexible plastic-based e-paper displays. The company recently withdrew from the e-reader market, and is now focused on technology licensing.

Update: Here's the complete list of OLED related posts and notes from SID 2012

So, SID 2012 is now over. Personally it was a very good show, even though I hear from many exhibitors that it was slow compared to past years. There were a lot of companies showing OLED displays, lighting panels and related products, and it seems that OLEDs are starting to become mainstream. I do plan to post in-depth posts with interesting details of my talks with various OLED companies, but in the meantime, here's my own "best of SID" list.

LG Display announced it developed a 5" Full-HD LCD panel, the smallest Full-HD (1920x1080 at 440 ppi!) panel in the world. The LCd panel is based on LGD's AH-IPS (Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) technology.

Yesterday we reported about Sharp's new IGZO based OLED. Here's a nice video showing the new displays, and also explaining Sharp's new crystal structure innovation that enables those displays. According this video, Sharp is not planning commercialization yet:

In the video you can see Sharp's two OLED prototypes. The first panel is a 13.5" 3840x2160 (QFHD) panel (326 ppi, WOLED/RGBW architecture). The second is a 3.4" flexible OLED (326 ppi as well, 540x960).

Update: Here's a video of the new displays, and more details

Sharp announced it will show two new oxide-TFT (IGZO) based OLED panel prototypes at SID 2012 next week. The first panel is a 13.5" 3840x2160 (QFHD) panel.The panel features 326 ppi and is made using a WOLED (RGBW) architecture - similar to LG's upcoming OLED TVs.

The second panel is a flexible OLED, 3.4" in size. It too features 326 ppi (540x960 resolution). We do not have more technical details, hopefully we'll learn more at SID.

Chimei Innolux announced today that they will be able to start producing AMOLED panels in Q4 2012. According to earlier reports, CMI is prepping its 3.5-Gen AMOLED fab, which will be able to produce about 3,000-5,000 substrates a month. CMI's AMOLED panels will be branded TRUEOLED (CMI first started using this brand in February 2011). CMI will show 3.4" and 4.3" panels at SID next week, hopefully we'll bring more information from the conference.

CMI's TRUEOLED panels use a WOLED (RGBW) architecture, the same design used by LGD in their upcoming 55" OLED TVs. CMI's panels will achieve 300 ppi and a very wide view angle (80% of vertical luminance even at a viewing angle of 45°).

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Kwon Oh-hyun says that Samsung is getting "huge" orders from other electronic makers for flexible OLED panels. Kwon re-confirms the plan to produce flexible OLEDs in 2012. According to reports, Samsung has converted several OLED lines for flexible panels, and these lines will produce 960,000 OLED "sheets" by the end of year (it's not clear what is meant by a "sheet", and whether this is a monthly or yearly capacity).

The same reports also suggest that Apple may be behind those "huge" orders. We do know that Apple is interested in flexible OLEDs, but it doesn't seem likely that they are actually planning to start using these displays soon. In any case the first "flexible" OLEDs will probably not be really flexible. They will be plastic based though, which means that they are quite shutterproof, in addition to being thin and light. It will also be possible to fix them on curved surfaces.

Sharp announced that they have begun to produce Oxide-TFT (IGZO) based LCDs at their Kameyama Plant #2. Sharp says that these displays will have smaller TFTs and thus increased pixel transparency - which leads to lower power consumption. Sharp's proprietary UV2A*3 photo-alignment technology employed in Sharp's AQUOS LCD TVs enables these displays to achieve high image quality.

Sharp also revealed some sample panel specification: 32" 3,840x2,160 (140 ppi), 10" 2,560x1,600 (300 ppi), 7" 800x1,280 (217 ppi). Sharp is expanding production scale through April "to meet market demand".