a-Si - Page 2

Ignis Innovation announced that samples of its 20" 1296x768 (XGA) AMOLED display will be available in August 2013. Ignis will offer these samples to display makers for evaluation of Ignis' MaxLife compensation technology in their own displays (more on this below). They will sell the display for low volume, demanding applications such as medical imaging and scientific imaging.

The 20" AMOLED panels use a-Si backplane and are made by RiTdisplay. The panels are only 1.3mm thick (the complete display module is 3 mm thick). The refresh rate is 240Hz.

DisplaySearch expects the AMOLED market to reach $11.3 billion in 2013, up 60% from 2012 ($6.9 billion). The market is still dominate by a single supplier (Samsung Display) and a single customer (Samsung), and it's still too early to tell whether OLEDs can really become a mainstream market.

DisplaySearch also released the interesting chart above that shows price comparison between AMOLED and LCD (a-Si and LTPS) panels. Most of the growth in 2013 will come from the 4.99" Full-HD (441 PPI) panel used by the GS4, and DisplaySearch estimates that 52 million of these panels will be produced in 2013 (over $3.2 billion in revenues).

Back in June 2012 I reported from SID on Ignis' Max Life technology. Max Life provides external compensation - that deals with OLED burn-in. The idea is to keep track of how much each pixel was used, and so it's possible to calculate the brightness loss in that particular pixel, and then drive this particular pixel correctly - to compensate. Ignis now released a nice video showing a 20" AMOLED panel (their own a-Si prototypes made by RiTDisplay) with a burn-in logo. When Max Life is turned on, the logo disappears:

Ignis explains that while Max Life theoretically makes the "eventual" lifetime (until the display burns out completely) worse, in practice it helps to make the device usable longer. Ignis says that the main problem is non-uniformity in brightness and not actual brightness.

There's a report that CECEP Oasis New Energy signed an agreement with China's Suizhou district's government to build a new OLED fab with an annual capacity of 500,000 square meters. Total investment will be $500 million, and the company expects to reach an annual revenue of about $700 million.

We don't have any technical details about this new project, besides that the OLED panels will be use an a-Si backplane. Oasis NE is a solar PV developer and producer, based in Beijing, China.

Just before SID, the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) announced that they managed to fabricate the world's largest (7.4") flexible (bendable) OLED using Mixed-Oxide TFTs. Those MO-TFTs deliver high performance (fast switching speeds and reduced power consumption), are quite cost-effective and can be produced on existing a-Si production lines. The FDC demonstrated this panel at SID.

This OLED panel was developed with funding from the US Army features 480x360 (81 ppi) resolution, has an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and is built on a PEN (polyethylene naphthalate) substrate. It was developed in collaboration with Universal Display, DuPont (Teijin film), Sunic and Henkel.

As I already said before, Ignis Innovation's SID booth was one of the conference highlights for me. Their technology is very impressive and hopefully will enable cheaper non-LTPS AMOLED production.

In their booth, Ignis were showing 3.5" and 20" AMOLED panels that use the company's a-Si backplane compensation technology. The panels were made by RiTdisplay. Ignis and RiTdisplay have been showing these displays back in 2011. Originally they were supposed to be released towards the end of 2011, but this never happened. During SID Ignis announced that now the plan is to release these by the end of 2012. According to Ignis the 3.5" AMOLED will be cheaper than the LTPS-based competition (i.e. Samsung made panels). You can read more about these panels and RiTdisplay's plans at my RiTdisplay-at-SID-2012 post.

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.

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.

Update: more information on this panel from SID 2012 here

The Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) have manufactured the world's largest (7.4") flexible (bendable) OLED using advanced Mixed-Oxide TFTs. The panel was developed in collaboration with the US Army Research Labs.

The FDC says that Mixed-Oxide TFTs deliver high performance (fast switching speeds and reduced power consumption) and are quite cost-effective and can be produced on existing amorphous silicon production lines.

Aneeve Nanotechnologies, a startup company at UCLA's on-campus technology incubator, managed to fabricate a new fully ink-jet printed carbon nanotube (CNT) circuit that is used to drive OLED displays. The company says that this is the first practical demonstration of carbon nanotubebased printed circuits for display backplane applications, and it shows significant performance advantages over traditional organic-based printed electronics.

Aneeve says that this shows that CNT is a viable technology to compete with a-Si and metal-oxide semiconductor for low-cost and scalable backplanes.