PPI - Page 18

Samsung is getting ready to release flexible OLEDs soon, and have announced that these displays will be branded as YOUM displays. Today the OLED association released some interesting information regarding Samsung's flexible OLED manufacturing program. According to this report, products that use these displays will be introduced in Q4 2012, while mass production will begin as early as next month.

Back in May 2011 Samsung announced a joint venture with Japan's Ube Kosan to develop and produce polyimide resin - to be used as substrates for their flexible displays in a $18 million investment. Now we hear that the curing equipment for the hardened polyimide will be provided by Korea's Tera Semicon.

A few days ago it was reported that AUO is collaborating with Sony on OLED production , and today the Chinese Commercial Times reports that Sony will buy all of AUO's AMOLED production capacity in the near term. Sony will use AUO's 4.3" AMOLED panels in upcoming mobile phones. This contradicts earlier reports that HTC secured AUO's entire capacity.

AUO's original plan was to produce AMOLEDs in Q2 2011, but the company delayed this due to technical issues (apparently the company couldn't get the yields of the vacuum evaporation deposition of the organic layers high enough). It is suggested that Sony's engineers are assisting AUO with those technical issues.

Japan Display (the new small/medium display maker that merged Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba's businesses) announced that it plans to start mass producing OLED displays for smartphones. First panel samples are expected by March 2013. In order to have an edge over Samsung, JD aims to achieve over 300 ppi and develop panels that are more efficient than Samsung's OLEDs. Analysts suggest that JD will try to secure Apple as a customer for their OLED panels.

Back in November there were reports that JD plans to accelerate OLED mass production with a $1.3 billion investment in OLED R&D (which probably includes pilot production plants), and later on invest a further $1.4 billion towards mass production. It was suggested that JD may convert their Mobara LCD plant (bought from Panasonic) to LTPS and later to AMOLED production.

Japan's Technology Research Association for Advanced Display Materials (TRADIM) said it managed to develop a flexible LCD display by using a film substrate and roll-to-roll (R2R) technologies. The display can be curved, and is thin, light-weight and unbreakable.

TRADIM unveiled a 3.5" prototype that features 114 ppi and is only 0.49mm thick. The R2R method deposits the polarizing and phase difference films, the color filters, the TFT and the backplane on the film substrate. This development marks the end of TRADIM's efforts - and now this technology will be left for commercialization by the individual companies behind the association (which include Sharp, Hitachi, NEC, Dai Nippon Printing, Toppan Printing, Sumitomo Chemical and others).

There are two interesting reports today regarding AU Optronic's OLED TV program. According to Reuters, the company is planning to sell up to 800 million shares (or about $300 million) to finance its OLED program and to "enhance the company's operational capital position". ETNews says that Sony is collaborating with AUO on OLED TV research. Perhaps it makes sense for Sony: AUO will provide the capital and manufacturing while Sony will contribute its OLED know-how (ETNews suggests that Sony engineers have been working with AUO since 2011).

Back in February AUO announced a strategic alliance with Idemitsu Kosan on OLED materials and technology, and ETNews suggests that this will turn into a three-way alliance with Sony now. We'll have to wait for confirmation of course, the only official word from Sony was when its new CEO said they will make "major investments towards OLED TVs" back in February.

Apple announced the new iPad 3 (or the New iPad as they call it), and it's got a new display: a 2048x1536 LED-backlit IPS LCD. Apple brands it as a Retina Display, even though the PPI is lower than the iPhone display (264 in the new iPad vs 326 in the iPhone's display). The new iPad also has a new CPU (dual-core Apple A5X), a new quad-core GPU, a 5mp camera and LTE. it's a bit thicker and heavier than the iPad 2 (9.4 mm and 662 grams vs 8.8mm and 613 grams).

So, no Apple OLED yet. We keep waiting...

Taiwan's government is forming an AMOLED alliance - to compete against Korean makers - mostly Samsung. The alliance will include seven partners: two AMOLED produces (AUO and Chimei Innolux) and ITRI, Acer, Asustek, HTC and MediaTek. It is reported that HTC and Asustek will secure all of AUO's upcoming AMOLED capacity.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), who is coordinating the alliance will invest around NT$10 billion (about $333 million US) in AMOLED R&D (mostly though ITRI). CMI will come up with an AMOLED production plan which will get subsidized by the government. Officials from the MOEA say that AMOLED is "rising as a must for next-gen smart phones", and is also likely to enter into the tablet and TV markets.

AU Optronics announced their financial results for 4Q 2011, with a record loss of $21 NT billion (almost $700 million USD). AUO is hoping to return to profitability - mostly because of growth in demand for LCD TVs in emerging markets such as India, Indonesia and Brazil. Regarding AUO's OLED program, the company re-iterated plans to mass produce AMOLED panels for mobile phone in this quarter (a little sooner then expected, actually), and more interestingly they said they plan to unveil OLED TV panel samples by the end of 2012.

AUO already unveiled a 32" OLED TV prototype back in November 2011, but they probably want to unveil larger panels towards the end of the year - and ones that are closer to mass production. The 32" prototype AUO shows had a Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and was fabricated using vapor deposition using a metal mask. The panel featured Full-HD (1920x1080) resolution, 100,000:1 contrast ration, 0.01ms response time and brightness of 200cd/m².

During AUO's conference call, the company gave some interesting updates on their OLED program. As was suggested before, the company is already sampling panels - these are 4" displays for smartphones that use RGB matrix and sport 247 PPI. AUO says that these displays will offer superior quality compared to Samsung's PenTile based displays, especially on fine text (of course samsung is also offering the RGB-matrix Super AMOLED Plus displays). The products will ship in Q2 2012, and the company is seeing interest from several device makers.

AUO's current capacity is 7000-8000 monthly substrates in their Gen-3.5 fab. In 2H 2012 the company plans to bring their Gen-4.5 fab online with a monthly capacity of 15,000 substrates.

Toshiba has developed a new 6.1" LTPS LCD panel that features 2560x1600 resolution - that's 498 ppi. The panel also features 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 16.7 million colors and 176-degrees viewing angles.

Toshiba wouldn't say whether they have plans to commercialize this display...