Wearable OLEDs - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 30

As expected, Samsung launched two new mobile devices today with Super AMOLED displays. First up is the Galaxy Note 3 that sports a 5.7" Full-HD Super AMOLED display (386 PPI), a 2.3 Quad-Core CPU (or a 1.9Ghz octa-core in some markets), 3 GB of RAM, 32/64GB of storage, a 13 MP camera (will be capable of 4K videos in some markets) and Android 4.3. Samsung managed to pack all this in a phone that is smaller and lighter than the Note 2.

The Galaxy Gear is Samsung's first smartwatch and it features a 1.63" 320x320 (275 PPI) Super AMOLED display, a 1.9 mp camera (can do 720p videos), 800Mhz processor, 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth 4, and a 315 mAh non-removeable battery. The watch will support third-party apps and 70 partners signed up to supply applications at launch.

Taiwanese CPT is showing a new prototype smart glass HMD that uses an AMOLED microdisplay. This Google Glass like product is "ready to ship":

CPT is using a 0.5" 800x600 (SVGA) microdisplay with a display area of 10.13x7.61 mm. It simulates a 15" display from 2.5 meters. As far as I know OLighTEK (a Chinese-based OLED microdisplay maker) is the only company that ships 0.5" SVGA OLED microdisplays so it is likely that they are the display supplier. CPT is also developing AMOLED displays, but as far as I know they do not produce OLED microdisplays.

According to the Korea Times, a Samsung executive (mobile VP Lee Young-hee) confirmed that the company will launch two new products on September 4 - the Galaxy Note 3 and the smartwatch Samsung has been working on for some time (which some say will be called the Galaxy Gear).

Galaxy Note II

We already knew the the Galaxy Note 3 will launch on September 4, but it's good to hear another confirmation. The Galaxy Gear, according to Young-hee, will not feature a flexible OLED display (which isn't surprising as Samsung will only start producing the panels in November and in limited capacity).

Researchers from Germany's TU Darmstadt University developed new glowing fibers by coating them with white OLED emitters. They call their technology reproducible rotational coating and they envision all sorts of possibilities in the area of smart textiles, as in the future it'll be possible to coat all sorts of semiconductor components (such as transistors or solar cells) on fibers.

The researchers use vacuum deposition and small-molecule OLEDs for this process. They deposit seven different layers but the whole OLED is just 200 nanometers thick. OLEDs require a very smooth substrate and so currently they use glass fibers - which aren't really useful in wearable applications as they are too brittle to be woven into textiles. They are now starting to experiment with polymer-coated glass fibers that may be flexible enough to be used in textiles.

Two days ago we reported on rumors that Google's next gen Google Glass HMD (or "wearable computer") will use OLED microdisplays made by Samsung Display. I wrote that as far as I know SDC never developed OLED microdisplays, but apparently I was wrong.

One of my sources sent me a conference paper from 2011 describing a 0.6" XGA OLED microdisplay - made by Samsung Mobile Display. The OLED-on-silicon device (Samsung calls them OLEDoS) used white OLEDs with color filters (all OLED displays made today use this architecture, although makers are moving towards direct emission). I don't think Samsung ever produced such displays, but apparently they did make some successful prototypes.

Back in December 2012 we posted a new Apple OLED rumor - about the iWatch: a bluetooth smart watch that has a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay. In February 2013 the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both posted about this rumor.

Today these rumors resurfaced. This time Taiwan's Economic Times reported that Apple had made some prototypes with a 1.8" PMOLED, but decided they were too large. Now they are testing 1.5" PMOLEDs, and have ordered a thousand units from Foxconn - for internal experimentation.

OLiGHTEK (Chinese-based OLED microdisplay maker) says that they sold 15,000 Eye Book units in 2012. The Eye Book is an HMD that uses two OLiGHTEK made 0.5" SVGA (800x600) OLED microdisplays.

I don't have a lot of information about this HMD though, the best I could find was the image below, and the fact that you can use the Eye Book for web surfing, image viewing and videos.

The Holst Centre released a few nice videos, and I think they're worth a watch. First up is the one about their flexible OLED display research. Last year Holst and imec announced a new program to develop high resolution flexible OLED displays, with a focus on a mechanically flexible encapsulation film and TFT backplane, printed high-efficiency OLED and new materials and processes. The video below shows their first display (which was already unveiled last month):

In this new video you can see that the display is monochrome (red) and contains several defects.

A couple of months ago we posted about a rumor claiming that Apple is working on a PMOLED Bluetooth smartwatch. Now the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both posting a similar story, which actually gives this rumor some credibility. This time they say that Apple is working with their long-time manufacturing partner Hon Hai Precision Industry.

We're not sure what is meant exactly by "curved glass". We have seen devices with curved rigid glass before (for example the Nexus S). The New York Times speculates that the new iWatch will use Corning's flexible Willow glass (shown in the video below) - and so probably the whole display will be curved, maybe something similar to the prototypes Samsung unveiled at CES.

Researchers from National Taiwan University presented their latest project called NailDisplay. The idea is to have a display on your finger nail that can be used for several applications such as showing what's beneath your finger when it's obscuring your phone's screen (while typing, for example), and controlling screen-less devices. Of course one can also imagine a fingernail phone...

The display used in their prototype is a 65K color, 0.96" PMOLED (96x64). Obviously in the future one could use a flexible/transparent OLED that will simply be unseen when not used rather than the bulky device used in this prototype.