Tianma - Page 4

US-based OLED fingerprint sensor developer Vkansee announced a partnership with Tianma to apply Vkansee's MAPIS OLED technology for TianMa's OLED displays.

Vkansee says that its fingerprint sensor optical resolution reaches 800 PPI, and its signal-to-noise ratio is 10 times better than competitive collimator or lens optical fingerprint solutions. Vkansee’s proprietary Matrix Pinhole Image Sensing (MAPIS) is integrated into the mobile phone OLED display panel, effectively turning the entire display into a high-resolution fingerprint lens.

Guangdong Juhua Printing Display Technology was established in 2016 by CSOT and Tianma with an aim to develop OLED ink-jet printing technologies and enable companies in China to collaborate on this technology.

While TCL-owned CSOT already announced that it is collaborating with Kateeva (and others), it was not clear whether Juhua Printing Display was also using Kateeva's printers, but we now have confirmation that indeed the China-based consortium is based on Kateeva's printers. This is obviously a major win for Kateeva, who is also working with BOE and Samsung, among others.

Tianma demonstrated new display technologies at Embedded World in Germany, including two new OLED prototypes. First up is a 10.3" 91 PPI transparent AMOLED panel that features a transparency of up to 50% and high brightness (not disclosed).

The second display is a 4.92" 403 PPI AMOLED that was produced using an ink-jet printing process. Tianma's technology was jointly developed with Guangdong Juhua Printing and Display Technology (which was established in 2016 by CSoT and TianMa).

CLSA says that as OLED displays are too expensive for many smartphone makers and lack enough differentiation to LCDs, the company is lowering its OLED adoption forecasts. CLSA now expects China's OLED smartphone shipments to total 116 million in 2018, 143 million in 2019 and 168 million in 2020. CLSA lowered its forecasts by 12-21%. In terms of penetration into the total Chinese smartphone market, CLSA sees 14% in 2018, 18% in 2019 and 21% in 2020.

Looking at the OLED makers, side, CLSA sees ample OLED supply in coming years, which means that expansion is likely to slow. CLSA assumed that OLED makers will achieve 70% yields and a utilization rate of 90%, which will bring all OLED makers to have a combined production capacity of around 288 million 6" panels in 2020. As demand will be only 168 million by Chinese phone makers (and remember there's also Samsung and LGD of course), this will create quite an oversupply situation in China. CLSA cuts its China OLED production forecasts by BOE, Tianma, Visionox, CSoT and Everdisplay by 23% to 26% in coming years.

Market analysts from CINNO Research estimate that Samsung Display produced 160.9 million AMOLED displays in H1 2018, which sets SDC's market share in the mobile AMOLED market at 93%. The two other large producers are LG Display and Visionox, both producing 3.5 million panels (2% market share).

Both Everdisplay (EDO) and BOE produced 1.7 million panels in the first half of 2018 - or about 1% of the market each. AU Optronics and Tianma produced 0.7 million panels (0.4% market share) and Truly closes the list with a market share of 0.2% (400,000 panels).

Tianma started producing rigid and flexible OLEDS in April 2017 at the company's 6-Gen fab in Wuhan, and on June 27th the company announced that it plans to construct the 2nd phase of the Wuhan AMOLED fab.

Tianma's Wuhan expansion project will cost around 14.5 billion Yuan ($2.12 billion USD) and will take about 25 months - so production at the 2nd phase is scheduled for September 2020. When the 2nd phase is complete' Tianma's flexible AMOLED capacity will be 37,500 monthly 6-Gen substrates.

Last month CSoT (TCL) announced plans to establish a 11-Gen LCD+OLED TV fab in Shenzhen, China. Details on the OLED part of that fab were not given, but now we have some updates following the company's investor day.

The new fab will use Oxide-TFT backplanes, and it turns out that the OLED part of the fab will also use the 11-Gen substrates (which may be cut for the actual OLED front plane deposition). Out of the entire capacity of 90,000 monthly substrates, the OLED line will use 20,000 substrates. The fab will start mass production in 2021.

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.

In April 2017 Chinese display maker TianMa announced that it commenced production at its 6-Gen LTPS AMOLED fab in Wuhan. The fab produces both rigid and flexible OLEDs, and last month Tianma demonstrated several of its latest flexible and foldable panels.

Today ETNews posts that TianMa is thinking of selling its OLED business, to Chinese display maker CEC-Panda. According to ETNews, TianMa did manage to produce 1.3 million rigid OLEDs in 2017, however Tianma's OLED losses are higher than expected, and its LCD business is also suffering due to declining LCD prices.

Digitimes reports that four of China's OLED makers (BOE, Visionox, Tianma and EDO) have stepped up their efforts to develop foldable OLEDs, and have all demonstrated foldable prototypes at the China Information Technology Expo 2018 (CITE 2018).

First up we have Visionox, with its 7.2" foldable panel you can see above. This was already reported last week.