Substrate - Page 5

AGC announced that it developed a carrier glass technology that can be used to laminate its 0.1 mm-thick ultra-thin glass on carrier glass. This means that current manufacturing processes can be used with AGC's ultra-thin glass without modification. AGC's ultra-thin glass offers excellent transparency, heat resistance and electrical insulation and is also flexible.

AGC is aiming towards roll-to-roll production methods, which could not use ultra-thin glass until now. The new technology uses a 0.5-mm thick carrier glass laminated on the ultra-thin glass itself. The laminated glass substrate can be handled much the same as an ordinary glass sheet: it protects the glass (from heat, chemical processes and direct contact with processing equipment) and can be easily be removed after processing.

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.

The Holst Centre and Solvay report advances in flexible OLED lighting panels. They present a bendable 69 cm² OLED panel that features 30 lm/W efficiency at 1000 cd/m²:

Cambrios announces a new CEO and a $5 million investment from Samsung Ventures. Cambrios reveals that they were in close discussions with Samsung for collaboration on "important and valuable" projects over the past several years. Cambrios' first product, ClearOhm is a coating material for plastic or glass that produces a transparent, conductive film by wet processing. Cambrios says that ClearOhm offers significantly higher optical and electrical performance than currently used materials (such as ITO).

ClearOhm can be used in OLED panels, LCDs, e-paper displays and solar panels. Perhaps Samsung wants to use this new material in upcoming OLED panel designs. Cambrios is also collaborating with Plextronics on OLED lighting electrodes.

There are reports that LG Display decided to built a pilot 3.5-Gen (730 × 460 mm) flexible OLED production line. They have ordered the equipment, which will arrive by 3Q 2012, and the line will become active by the end of 2012. An official from LGD is quoted saying that it will take 1-2 years to develop and verify the process and produce prototypes. The company hasn't decided on a production schedule yet.

LG Display's flexible OLEDs will use the same technology as Samsung's flexible prototypes - a polyimide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use WOLED with color filters).

The Holst Centre released a short video showing a new 30x30 cm flexible OLED lighting panel on a metal foil:

We don't have any more details yet, but this is quite a nice prototype...

During LG Display's conference call discussing their Q3 2011 financial results, the company reiterated plans to release a 55" OLED TV product in the middle of 2012. LG's OLED TV will be Oxide-TFT based. This will not be mass production, but the company hopes that towards the end of 2012 they will announce their plans for mass production. LG Display is aiming towards 80%-90% yield in their pilot plant, and will announce the yield in the middle of 2Q 2012.

LG OLED TV prototype

We already know that LG isn't developing small OLED panels for mobiles any more, but LG are developing plastic based OLEDs (using their existing 4.5-Gen fab) as they consider these to have the real value for the mobile solution. They say that as they have experience with plastic based e-paper prototypes they hope that this is will not take long to develop.

Researchers from the University of Toronto developed the world's most efficient OLED on plastic, which they say is comparable with the best glass-based OLEDs. They discovered that coating the plastic substrate with a 50-100 nano-meter thick layer of tantalum(V) oxide (Ta2O5), an advanced optical thin-film coating material enabled them to re-construct the high-refractive index property previously limited to heavy metal-doped glass:

The researchers say that to create a high-efficiency OLED you need a high-refractive-index (n 10,000 cd/m².

Samsung Electronics says that it plans to launch products with flexible OLED panels next year, probably starting with mobile phones, then followed by tablets and other portable devices. The company is actually hoping to introduce the products in the "earlier part of 2012".

This was reported before, although up until now Samsung said the plan is to launch flexible OLEDs in 2013 or 2014, so it's good to see they are advancing more quickly than they thought before. Samsung's flexible AMOLEDs will be fabricated on a plastic (Polyimide) substrate and will be able to withstand high temperature (up to 350-400 degrees). The displays can be bendable - but we assume that the first products will use them inside rigid glass cases - so it'll actually be "curved" displays and not flexible ones.

HP has developed a new method to produce large AMOLED panels, based on roll-to-roll manufacturing. They say that one of the biggest challenges to make flexible OLEDs is the alignment on large area flexible substrates. The new solution uses self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) to laminate a well-defined micro OLED (µOLED) frontplane unto a flexible active matrix amorphous silicon TFT backplane.

SAIL process flow

HP says they already built a proof-of-concept AMOLED device - which contains a flexible µOLED frontplane with OLED sizes of 50 µm on PET and active matrix backplane on polyimide with pixel pitches of 1 mm. The company claims that the new method will enable large area OLEDs at a very low cost.