WRGB - Page 12

Japan Display unveiled their first OLED prototype, a 4.5" 1280x720 (326 ppi) panel at the FPDI 2012 exhibition. JD is using an WRGB architecture (white OLEDs with color filters) and a top-emission device structure.

JD says that mass production of this panel will begin in fiscal 2014. Back in April 2012 they announced plans to start OLED mass production by March 2013. In any case, it's great to see their first OLED prototype.

eMagin reported their Q2 2012 results with record revenues of $8.6 million (a 15.3% increase over Q2 2011). Net income was $577,000. eMagin has about $13.3 million in cash. During Q2 the company bought back 125,000 shares (average price $2.95).

New deposition machine

Andrew Sculley (eMagin's CEO) says that eMagin have finally started to produce microdisplays on their new deposition machine. The machine isn't yet fully optimized, and they are also producing on their older Satella machine. eMagin says that once the new machine is fully optimized (they need to automate a certain process still), capacity will grow 10-fold, and the displays will have better uniformity - which will increase quality and yields.

DisplaySearch says that the AMOLED market is expected to grow almost tenfold from 2012 (2.3 million square meters) to 2016 (22 million square meters). DisplaySearch are basing their forecast on planned investments, and they say that most of the capacity increase will be driven by OLED TV production.

While Samsung has been successful in improving yields for small OLED production (to an almost-LCD level) and thus enabling an only 30% premium over LCDs, producing large OLED panels is still very expensive - mainly due to low yields and high material costs.

Chimei Innolux had a nice booth at SID 2012, and I was given a nice tour of the booth by their PR people (who allowed me to take photos and videos even though they had a sign saying it ain't allowed). CMI's marketing guys were also kind enough to answer a few questions I had on their OLED program.

A few days before SID CMI announced that it will begin to produce 3.4" and 4.3" panels by Q4 2012. At SID I learned that the first OLED fab to go online is actually an old TPO/Toppoly 3.5-Gen fab. The panels will use LTPS backplane and will both feature 960x540 resolution (so it's 326 ppi on the 3.4" panel and 257 ppi on the 3.4" panel). CMI says that their technology is "ready" for 4.5" 720p (326ppi) panels as well.

Sony released 0.5" 1024x768 (2,560 ppi, 9.9um pixel pitch) and 0.7" 1280x720 (2,098 ppi, 12um pixel pitch) OLED microdisplays back in August 2011, and now they gave some interesting details about the technology used to fabricate those panels. The 0.5" OLEDs are used in several 'A' class digital cameras, and the 0.7" microdisplays are used in the HMZ-T1 HMD device.

We already know that the microdisplays use white OLEDs with RGB color filters (all OLED microdisplays on the market use this architecture, although eMagin are working on direct-emission ones). Sony are using stacked RGB fluorescent materials. They say they did not choose red and green PHOLEDs because of lifetime, reliability and cost considerations.

One of the first companies I wanted to visit at SID was eMagin. I met the company's CEO (Andrew G. Sculley) for the first time, and he gave me a very nice introduction to the company's current business and future plans. I'll try and summarize that meeting and eMagin's booth in this post.

eMagin is now in the final testing and qualification stages of its new deposition and seal machines. Those new machines are expected to increase capacity and improve yields. It will also free up the current machines for R&D, which seems to be very important for Andrew.

LG Display had a very big booth at SID 2012, showing lot's of displays. The main item on show was the 55" OLED TV panel, but all the rest of the displays were LCDs. As I said in my first post from SID, LG's OLED TVs stunning with great colors, amazing contrast and excellent 3D effects. Unlike Samsung, LGD had only one TV on show, showing 2D and 3D convent sequentially (the 3D uses passive glasses). LG's OLED panel is extremely thin - 4 mm, you can hardly see it looking from the side.

During LG Display's keynote speech, they made some very interesting comments about their OLED technology and business. First of all, LG expects OLED TVs to grow at 320% (CAGR) from 2012 to 2016, reaching 11% of the TV market, while the rest of the market - LCD/PDP/CRT will only grow at 1.1%. OLED TV is the "next evolution" of TV technology.

Sony has developed a 9.9" 960x540 (111ppi) flexible OLED panel, using an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and a WOLED-CF architecture (RGBW). The thickness of this panel is only 110 um. To make this panel, Sony used two glass substrates (for the backplane and the color filters) during the production process, which were later removed. This allows Sony to use their regular OLED manufacturing process. We're not sure what kind of material is used as the final substrate.

The small-molecule OLED materials were deposited using vapor deposition. Unfortunately the company didn't demonstrate this panel at SID.

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.

Yesterday we reported about Sharp's new IGZO based OLED. Here's a nice video showing the new displays, and also explaining Sharp's new crystal structure innovation that enables those displays. According this video, Sharp is not planning commercialization yet:

In the video you can see Sharp's two OLED prototypes. The first panel is a 13.5" 3840x2160 (QFHD) panel (326 ppi, WOLED/RGBW architecture). The second is a 3.4" flexible OLED (326 ppi as well, 540x960).