8.6-Gen AMOLED production lines - current snapshot and future industry outlook

The OLED's industry main new target, for the past several years, has been the IT display sector, mainly tablets, laptops and monitors. While we have seen OLED displays penetrate this market many years ago, the current 6-Gen AMOLED production lines are optimized for smartphone and wearable display production.

A few years ago display makers realized that OLED production lines with larger substrates will enable lower cost production, and will enable to increase the adoption of OLEDs in such devices. When this converged with technology readiness (depositing OLED materials and TFTs on such large areas was not possible before), several companies initiated new projects, all of which use 8.6-Gen (2250 x 2600 mm) substrates. We are now at a stage where two companies (BOE and Samsung) are very close to mass production, and the first displays will start production soon. 

In this article, we detail all four 8.6-Gen OLED production lines that are currently being built - by Samsung Display, BOE, TCL CSOT and Visionox. We also other display makers and how likely they are of launching large-scale 8.6-Gen lines as well. Finally, we see how these new lines will effect the entire OLED industry, whether it is likely we'll see new lines (do we actually need all that added capacity?) and what we expect to happen next.

Samsung Display - A6 Asan fab

Samsung Display is building a 8.6-Gen AMOLED line in Asan, Korea. This line, that will produce panels on rigid (glass) substrates, was an LCD production line before, and Samsung estimated that the total project cost will reach $3.1 billion when it launched the project in 2024. Even though this line required new technologies and equipment never used before, Samsung kept up its original plan to initiate mass production in 2026.