WRGB - Page 6

After years of OLED R&D but no actual reports, Taiwan's Innolux is finally demonstrating its new OLED prototypes, signalling that the company is finally about to re-enter the OLED market. Innolux says that it has recently "achieved success with AMOLED technology" and now plans to continue development and ultimately mass produce AMOLED panels.

In a trade-show in Taiwan, Innolux is demonstrating several OLED prototypes. First up we have a 5.5" WQHD (2560x1440, 534 PPI) flexible AMOLED built on a plastic substrate and an LTPS backplane. The panel has a "proprietary pixel rendering methods" (perhaps PenTile like?) and uses thin-film encapsulation and is produced using an FMM mask (more on this below).

Reports from China suggest that LG Display is considering changing the basic structure of its white OLED panels (WOLED) used in LGD's OLED TVs. LGD is currently using yellow and blue OLED materials to create a white OLED, but now LGD may switch to an RGB based mix.

It's not clear from the Chinese reports (which are unverified yet, of course) - but it's likely that LGD will not switch to a direct-emission RGB structure, but rather use the RGB materials to create a white OLED and remain with a color-filter based design. Switching from Y/W to R/G/B may enable LGD to achieve higher color purity - and so a larger color gamut, and may also be more efficient.

Japan Display demonstrated flexible OLEDs at SID 2016. Those WRGB panels are 5.2" in size with a Full-HD resolution (1920x1080, 423 PPI). The luminance is 300 nits, the color gamut is 108% sRGB and the bending radius is 53 mm.

JDI refers to these panels as film-type OLEDs, or "curved-sheet OLED". The panels have quite a large bending radius. What's even more disappointing, though, is that these seem to be the exact same panels demonstrated at SID 2014 and SID 2015.

Universal Display developed a new AMOLED structure that is a sort of WOLED - RGB hybrid structure. The idea is to use a large blue sub-pixel and a large yellow sub-pixel that is split into three areas - unfiltered and red and green filtered.

This structure is easier to deposit compared to a true RGB AMOLED (that requires very fine patterning of red, green and blue subpixels) but increase the aperture ratio compared to a WOLED architecture (which LG for example uses in its OLED TVs) - which increases the lifetime and color gamut of the display.

Samsung Display recently confirmed that it is still developing large-sized OLED panels, and a couple of weeks ago it was reported that Samsung is discussing a large investment (around $3 billion US) into a new OLED TV panel fab.

New reports from Korea gives more details about Samsung's OLED TV plans. Samsung is actually considering a slightly larger investment - around $3.3 billion in a new fab, with an aim to enable Samsung Electronics to launch OLED TVs by 2018. Samsung is looking to build a Gen-8 (2200x2500 mm, or six 55" panels) fab - and will need to start ordering equipment soon. The new fab will enable Samsung to produce about 495,000 square meters in 2017 (7,500 monthly substrates) and over 2 million square meters in 2018.

LGD has another interesting demonstration at CES - a 55" Full-HD transparent OLED. This is an WRGB OLED architecture that offers 600 nits of brightness and 40% transmittance.

It's not clear how close are LGD to commercialization. This is LG's largest transparent OLED ever demonstrated (in July 2014 LGD showed 18" transparent OLEDs).

The OLED Association posted an interesting article, summarizing 2015 and giving its projection for 2016 and onwards. So first of all, they conclude that 2015 was a great year for the OLED display industry, with shipments up 53% over 2014 to reach almost 275 million units. AMOLED Revenues grew to almost $13 billion - up 40% over 2014.

The growth was mostly due to Samsung Display's effort to commercialize flexible OLED displays for mobile phones and the expansion of AMOLED customer beyond Samsung Electronics. LG Display also contributed to the OLED display market, and the OLED association estimates the LG sold over 400,000 OLED TVs. They also say that they shipped around 14,000 flexible OLEDs, but they probably mean around 14 million - as that about makes sense for the Apple Watch.

Researchers from ETRI (Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) developed transparent graphene based electrodes specifically for OLED displays.

The researchers say that current metal (mostly silver) based electrodes have a limited viewing angle because of their internal light reflection, and the external light reflection affects the image quality. Graphene electrodes are more transparent and reduce the reflectance by 40-60 percent.

During the OLED World Summit, an analyst from UBI gave an interesting presentation, showing the company's view of the current status of the OLED TV industry, and their OLED market forecasts for upcoming years.

So first of all, we have LG and Samsung. LGD has obviously been successful in launching WOLED OLED TVs, and scaling up to mass production has been achieved. LG is also hopeful that solution processing will enable them to produce RGB-structured OLEDs efficiently. LG is collaborating with Merck and Espon on printing technologies.

LG Display is one of the two companies that lead the OLED industry, and the Korean display maker recently announced a major shift in focus from LCD displays to OLEDs. We conducted a short interview with an official from LGD regarding the company's OLED business goals and aims.

Q: LGD's CEO recently gave a very exciting speech regarding OLEDs, as the company shifts its focus towards OLEDs. What made you take that decision? How do you see the OLED TV market evolving in the next few years?

Market competition is getting fiercer with Chinese manufacturers rapidly catching up in terms of technology and capacity. In response, we recognize that differentiation in product and technology is essential to growth and maintaining leadership in the display industry.