LG Display announced that it has started to mass produce 17" 2560x1920 foldable OLED laptop displays. LGD applied a tandem stack architecture, to increase the lifetime of the OLED displays, to make it suitable for the demands of laptop use.
It is likely that the recently announced HP Spectre Foldable PC uses LG's new panels.
Today we published a new edition of our Automotive OLED Market Report, with all the latest information. The new edition includes new car models with OLED displays and lighting, and updates from several companies, including LG's new automotive OLED strategy. The adoption of OLED technologies by the automotive is accelerating and expected to continue in the future.
This OLED Automotive market report provides a great introduction to OLED display and lighting solutions for the automotive industry. This is a great guide for anyone involved with the automotive market - car makers, suppliers and aftermarket solutions.
LG Display detailed its latest automotive display strategy. The company is now offering three product family. For luxury flagship cars (over $80,000 in cost), the company is offering its P-OLED flexible panels, that offer high performance coupled with design freedom.
For premium cars ($50,000 - $80,000) the company offers rigid OLEDs, that offer high image quality and a tandem OLED architecture for increased efficiency and lifetime. These displays are lower in cost compared to LG's P-OLEDs, and LG brands these as ATO (Advanced Thin OLEDs) as they adopt TFE encapsulation over a glass substrate. For mass market cars ($30,000 - $50,000) LGD offers LTPS LCDs.
Researchers from South China University of Technology and Guangzhou New Vision Opto-Electronic have found that the lifetime and current efficiency of a tandem OLED device can be greatly improved by adding an ultra-thin Ytterbium (Yb) metal layer through the charge generation layer (CGL).
The experiments detail an ultra-thin Yb metal layer with low work function, high transmittance, and large atomic radii, added to a light-green tandem OLED devices. The new device exhibited a lifetime of 308 hours (T90) at an initial brightness of 10,000 cd/m2 - which is 362 times (!) longer than that of a similar device without the Yb layer (T90 = 0.85 hours). The lifetime of the same material in a single-layer configuration (not a tandem device) was 49 hours (T90).
LG Display is demonstrating its new 30" and 77" transparent OLED displays for the first time, at the company's booth at K-Display 2023, in Seoul, Korea.
Credit: LG Display
The new 30" transparent OLED offers HD resolution, while the 77" panel offers 4K resolution. All of LG's latest transparent OLED displays offer 45% transparency. LG showed its entire range of T-OLED displays in a coffee shop setting, in partnership with Starbucks.
eMagin announced that it developed (and demonstrated) a 15,000 nits WUXGA (1920x1200) full-color OLED microdisplay, setting a new world record (surpassing eMagin's own 10,000 nits record from 2021).
This new microdisplay was deposited using the company's direct-patterning (dPd) technology, which means that there are no color filters. This is a single-stack device, and eMagin says that in the future it could use a tandem architecture to improve the performance further.
Apple's interest in OLED displays for future iPad tablet device is not secret, and many analysts estimate that the first such device will be released in 2024.
One of Apple's requirement is for superior performance for its tablets compared to smartphone AMOLED displays - and so developers are relying on a tandem OLED structure. According to a new report from Korea, LG Display is developing another unique technology for Apple's iPads.
DSCC says that even though the display market is facing difficult market conditions, the automotive displays segment is expected to continue growing, and total shipments (both LCDs and OLEDs) are expected to exceed 200 million panels (an average of over 2 displays per car).
OLEDs are still a small percentage of the market (less than 0.5%, in fact), but OLEDs will gradually penetrate high-end applications for flagship models, as OLED makers adopt flexible and tandem-architecture technologies.
Korea-based ETNews reports that Apple has finally committed to adopt OLED displays in future tablets and laptops, and the company has signed a contact with a "local OLED developer" (which means either Samsung Display or LG Dispaly) to develop four different OLED displays.
According to the report, Apple decided to adopt a 10.86" and 12.9" AMOLED displays for future iPad devices, and 14" and 16" displays for future MacBooks. The first OLED iPad will be released in 2024, while the first OLED MacBook will come later in 2026.
In the past year or so, much have been said about Samsung's plans to build a 8-Gen OLED IT production line, as the company wants to expand its capacity for monitors, laptops and tablet OLED displays.
Samsung plan for a full-cut 8-Gen line
As this is the first such production line, SDC had two ongoing R&D projects: one with Ulvac, that used full-cut vertical OLED deposition, and another with Canon Tokki, that used half-cut horizontal deposition. According to the latest reports from Korea, SDC decided to prioritize the Canon Tokki half-cut project, as the technology is more mature and is more likely to finish as per Apple's roadmap.
