Tianme had an large booth in SID, showcasing many display technologies and demonstrating its latest LCD and OLED panels. Tianma started producing rigid and flexible OLEDS in April 2017 at the company's 6-Gen fab in Wuhan, and at SID the company demonstrated its 5.5" on-cell rigid AMOLEDs now in production. Tianma told us that this display was adopted in smartphones by Lenovo and Asus.
Tianma also demonstrated several flexible OLEDs in many configurations which we will list below. Almost all of the panels were based on the same basic display - a flexible 5.99" WQHD 1440x2280 (537.5 PPI) AMOLED produced on a polyimide substrate. Tianma showed this panel in a regular design, and also in a notch-type design.
Tianma also developed a foldable-type flexible WQHD OLED, again a 5.99" 537 PPI one with a bending radius of 3mm. In one of the panels at the demonstration Tianma integrated a strain sensor, which can be used to create a UI based on the bending of the display, this was demonstrated very nicely.
The idea of using the flexible nature of OLEDs as a user-interface element is not new - Nokia demonstrated it back in 2011 - but it is still a great idea I think - and could be potentially very useful in future designs.
Another interesting OLED was a pressure-sensor enabled AMOLED - a force touch display. In this panel the pressure sensor is integrated into the display itself, which results in a thinner panel that offers higher sensitivity and lower cost compared to other solutions. The display itself was the same 5.99" WQHD flexible AMOLED.
In addition to the WQHD panel, Tianma had a similar panel but with a lower 1080x2160 resolution (403 PPI). This panel however uses a real-RGB sub-pixel matrix (not a pentile-like display like most high res AMOLEDs today), which Tianma calls True-Resolution (or real-FHD, even tough it's actually higher in resolution than FHD).
The last AMOLED on display was a 4.2" automotive-grade AMOLED, which offers a high-brightness (800 nits) and high reliability. The resolution was only 480x272.
Tianma also demonstrated a large transparent display in the AMOLED section of its booth - but the quality of this display was quite low. It turned out that not only is that not an OLED display, but its even not a Tianma-made display, it was commissioned by the booth design company - a strange decision to do so by a display maker.
Finally - a couple of months ago it was reported in Korea that Tianma seeks to sell its OLED business. We still do not know for sure, but it's clear that Tianma is advancing its OLED technologies and according to what we heard at SID the report in Korea was not true.
