Wearable OLEDs - Introduction and Latest Industry News - Page 9

In 2013, Samsung announced its YOUM flexible OLED brand, showing off several flexible OLED prototypes - including a foldable phone/tablet. Samsung never used the YOUM brand name again, but the foldable smartphone concept presented in 2013 (see image below) is still exciting consumers - and many of them are still waiting for Samsung to commercialize the technology.

Fast forward to 2015, and the first reports of Samsung's Project Valley started to surface. Samsung started to actually develop a foldable phone, with plans to release its first device in 2016. Samsung faced many challenges - and delays - in its foldable smartphone project (which was recently renamed to Project Winner) - including problems with the substrate and the software and user interface.

According to reports from Korea, Samsung Electronics is in talks with BOE regarding a possible OLED supply agreement for Samsung's Galaxy Watch. BOE is working on samples as it aims to replace the 1.3" and 1.2" Galaxy Watch displays currently produced by Samsung Display.

This is a rather surprising report - as Samsung Display is a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, and it has excess capacity in its OLED production fabs. It could be that Samsung Electronics is trying to put pressure on SDC to lower its prices, and of course this would be an excellent deal for BOE and a great endorsement for its OLEDs.

Earlier this month, Nubia demonstrated a smartband that turns into a smartphone - with a foldable OLED display. We assumed that Nubia is using an OLED produced by either BOE or SDC, but it turns out that the producer is China-based Visionox.

A couple of days ago, at the 2018 China Display Technology Conference, Visionox demonstrated some of its latest foldable panels, and announced that the Nubia is using the company's panel. According to our information, the Nubia uses a 3.23" AMOLED display (when open) - and the device will indeed start shipping in China soon (before the end of 2018).

Researchers at the Fraunhofer FEP institute developed a new wearable OLED-based "button" that can be integrated into textiles. The OLEDs can be designed in any shape, be transparent, dimmable and also patterned. There is also a two-color variant.

The Fraunhofer developers say that such elements can be used for fashion trends, branding, safety applications, light therapy and more. The so-called O-Button is based on an OLED deposited on a wafer-thin foil combined with a micro-controller on a conventional circuit board.

As expected, Apple launched three new smartphones. The 2018-2019 lineup includes the OLED iPhone XS and XS Max and the iPhone XR which uses an LCD display.

The iPhone XS is the successor to the iPhone X - this phone sports a 5.8-inch 1125x2436 flexible notch-type AMOLED display (produced by Samsung Display), 4GB of RAM and 64/256/512 GB of storage.

Update: It turns out that the display used by Nubia is produced by Visionox and not BOE as we assumed

China-based Nubia unveiled a new smart wearable device called the Nubia Alpha, which uses an elongated foldable OLED display. Nubia says that this device will ship in China by the end of 2018.

If Nubia actually ships its Alpha device before the end of 2018, it may become the first company to ship a foldable OLED smartphone. Samsung is gearing up to start foldable OLED production in 2018 but its first foldable smartphone is likely to ship in early 2019. Huawei is also said to get ready to release a foldable phone before the end of 2018 - using displays made by BOE. In fact BOE is reportedly developing foldable OLEDs for several smartphone makers - which means that it's likely that the Nubia Alpha is using a BOE display.

China-based Royole demonstrated its latest technologies at IFA 2018 - including the company's flexible AMOLEDs integrated into a top hat and a jacket and the company's Moon OLED HMD and its RoWrite E Ink writing pad.

Royole's flexible OLED displays are produced at the company's "quasi-G6" (5.5-Gen) OLED production fab in Shenzhen which started production in June 2018. In full capacity, Royole's fab will be able to produce over 50 million flexible OLEDs per year (45,000 monthly substrates).

The current F-35 Joint Strike Fighter $400,000 helmet uses an LCD microdisplay (produced by Kopin), which has a "technical bug" - a green glow (from the LED backlighting) that prevents pilots from seeing a carrier's lights at night.

The US Navy is working to replace the LCD microdisplay with an OLED one. The new OLED display will be ready for field testing "sometime early next year".

Canalys estimates that 10 million smartwatches were shipped in Q2 2018 (the 2nd largest quarter ever after Q4 2017 with 12.5 million). Apple is still the largest smartwatch producer - even though its market share fell to 34% in the second quarter. In 2017 Apple's market share in this market was around 60%.

As LG Display is the exclusive supplier of Apple's smartwatch OLED displays, IHS says that LGD is the world's leading AMOLED supplier for smartwatches and wearables. In 2017 LGD shipped 10.64 million such AMOLED displays (a market share of 41.4%). In total 25.7 million smartwatch AMOLEDs were shipped in 2017.

n-tech Research released a new Micro-LED market report in which they estimate that the market will grow from $2.7 billion in 2019 to over $70 billion in 2027. The markets for Micro-LED displays, according to n-Tech, will include wearables, near-eye displays, HUDs, projection displays and extra large area displays.

All of these applications will benefit from the small size, low weight, high brightness and high resolution of Micro-LED displays. Extra large-area displays will benefit from the linear scalability of Micro-LED displays.