WRGB - Page 8

Last month Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic announced the formation of a new OLED company. JOLED, funded by the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, will be established formally in January 2015, and will focus mainly on medium sized OLEDs for tablet applications.

JDI 5.2-inch FHD OLED prototype

One of the key questions surrounding JOLED is the technology choice. While Sony (and JDI, which is basing its OLED program on Sony's tech) is using small-molecule OLEDs and an evaporation process, Panasonic based its OLED development on Sumitomo's PLED materials and printing technologies.

Since they launched the world's first OLED TV in August 2013, LG managed to slash the price from $14,999 to about $4,000 (currently the EA9800 costs $4,299 in Amazon.com). We all hope LG will continue to lower the price, obviously, so it's good to hear that LGD's Byeonggyu Roh says that they will continue to reduce the cost of their OLED TV panel production.

According to UBI Research, LGD ultimate goal is to reach a price premium of only 10% over LCDs. LG needs to lower the costs across the board - taking advantage of existing LCD lines and equipment, optimizing the thickness of all th display layers (TFT, organic materials and encapsulation), improving the production process times and more.

LGD is still constructing its $650-million Gen-8 M2 OLED TV production line, but the company's CEO announced yesterday that LGD will invest a further 700 billion Won (over $788 million) to increase the capacity of that fab to 34,000 monthly substrates (up from 26,000).

It seems that LG is forecasting a rising demand for OLED TVs once their prices become competitive with LCDs (which should happen once the M2 is online). The company also wants to sign up more TV producers besides LG Electronics (they are currently supplying to China's Skyworth and Changhong, but reportedly they are in talks with Sony and Panasonic as well).

A couple of weeks ago I reported that BOE showed a 55" 4K WRGB OLED TV at SID 2014. When I posted on this, I said that BOE probably used a panel supplied by LG Display (although it didn't make a lot of sense).

It turns out that I was wrong, and that panel was produced by BOE Display themselves, at the company's AMOLED pilot Gen-8.5 line in Hefei. The panel uses a bottom-emission white OLED with a color filter array (WRGB architecture). BOE also uses internal compensation technology. The 5 mm thick panel features a contrast ratio of over 100,000:1, a response time of 0.2 ms and a brightness of 120-400 nits.

Samsung Display and LG Display had been fighting over display patents for a long time - with lawsuits launched by both sides and even accusations of stolen prototype TVs. In February 2013 the two companies agreed to resolve their OLED dispute and they even considered cross-licensing patents. Later in September 2013, they dropped all OLED lawsuits against each other in a reconciliatory gesture.

But the latest report from Korea is that the LG and SDC failed to negotiate a settlement. SDC wants to reach a patent cross-licensing deal, but LG is not interested. I think this may be because LG believes its WRGB technology is superior (and indeed they are much more advanced in their OLED TV efforts) - and perhaps Samsung is interested in adopting this technology for their OLED TVs as well.

Update: that panel was actually produced by BOE themselves, at the company's Gen-8 AMOLED pilot line in Hefei

It turns out that BOE had a 55" UHD (3840x2160) WRGB OLED TV prototype on display at SID 2014. The TV features a contrast ratio of over 100,000:1, a color gamut over 85%, a response time of 0.2 ms and a brightness of 120-400 nits. The whole TV is less than 5 mm thick.

It seems likely that BOE is using a 55" 4K panel made by LGD. After all we know that LG already launched such 4K OLEDs in Korea, and the Korean company is happy to offer its panels to other makers (including Changhong, Skyworth and perhaps even Sony and Panasonic).

Sony announced a new 0.23" 640x400 (nHD+) OLED microdisplay aimed for wearable devices. The microdisplay features a pixel pitch of 7.8um and a 110% NTSC color gamut. Sony aims to ship this display in 2015.

Sony says that the new microdisplay, while being smaller (and with a lower resolution) compared to their current 0.5" product, it offers a higher performance. The contrast ratio has been improved from 10,000:1 to 100,000:1, the brightness enhanced from 200 to 800 cd/m² and the power consumption has been slashed from 400 to 140 mW. The viewing angle has also been improved.

Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, in collaboration with Nokia developed a new foldable OLED display. The companies are demonstrating two display prototypes. Both displays are 5.9" in size with a 1280x720 (249 PPI) resolution. One of them can be folded in two (like a book) and the other can be folded in three (seen in the video below).

Those flexible OLED displays use a white OLEDs with color filters (WOLED-CF) design. To produce the display, SEL deposited the organic and color filters layers on a glass substrate, which is later peeled off and replaced with a flexible substrate. The displays can be bent up up to a curvature of 2 mm (two-folds) or 4 mm (three folds). SEL says that these displays can be bent more than 100,000 times.

China's Changhong launched their first OLED TV, the 55Q1A. This TV uses LG Display's curved 55" panel. It's not clear from the info I saw, but it may feature 4K resolution (although it's seems rather unlikely). In any case, the TV is now shipping in China for 48,888 yuan (about $7,800).

Changhong is now China's second OLED TV maker. Just last month Skyworth launched their own 55" curved OLED TV, the TianChi E980. Skyworth also uses OLED panels supplied by LG Display. It's interesting to see LG Display strategy of supplying OLED panels to other companies beside LG Electronics.

Japan Display's OLED R&D manager Masahiko Suzuki discussed the company's AMOLED program during a conference in Japan. Masahiko explains (see slide below) that for the medium-term, the small/medium display maker is focused on high-res LCD panels (over 500 PPI), but for the long term the main focus will be on OLED displays.

JDI sees OLED as a way to create a new market for flexible, transparent and roll-to-roll printed displays. JDI is set to develop flexible OLEDs and later on high-resolution OLEDs. JDI is using LG's WRGB technology which enables them to achieve a high resolution and a lower power consumption on mainly-white images (such as a web browser). But currently JDI sees OLEDs as still too expensive, and there are still issues with lifetime and uniformity.