OLED News - Page 1

LG Display announced its results for Q2 107 - revenues increased 13% from 2016 to KRW6.63 trillion (around $6 billion USD) and net income reached KRW737 billion ($660 million USD). TV panels accounted for 46% of LGD's revenues, mobile devices 22% and desktop monitors and tablets and notebook displays accounted for the rest.

In addition to the earning results, LGD detailed its investment path for OLEDs, as was decided in a recent board meeting. First of all, LGD decided to build a 10.5-Gen (2940x3370 mm) OLED line in its upcoming P10 fab in Paju. LGD will make an up-front investment of KRW2.8 trillion ($2.5 billion USD). The whole fab will require more investments but LGD says it is taking a prudent approach - it will only begin mass production of OLED TVs after stabilizing the technology for these extra large size substrates.

In March 2016 the EU launched a new project, called, PI-SCALE, that aims to create a European-wide pilot line which will enable companies of all sizes to quickly and cost effectively test and scale up their flexible OLED lighting concepts and turn them into market ready products.

PI-SCALE members started to produce sample panels - and can currently make long films up to 10 meters in size. You can see such sheets (cut to 1.8 meters) in the video above, taken at SID DisplayWeek.

The US Department of Energy announced 11 new solid state lighting projects grants, out of which five are related to OLED technologies (the rest are for new LED technologies).

We already posted on two of these grants which were awarded to Pixelligent. In addition to Pixelligent, OLEDWorks were also awarded with two SBIR Phase 1 projects, one for an ultrathin, curved, high-efficiency OLED light engine that will reduce the cost OLED lighting and the second for the development of a novel substrate and encapsulation process.

In 2015, Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed National Tsing-Hua University's blue-light free OLED lighting technology (called Candlelight OLEDs), with an aim to mass produce these OLEDs by the end of 2017.

National Tsing-Hua University demonstrated the latest panel at SID DisplayWeek a few weeks ago, as can be seen in the video above.

BMW has been developing OLED automotive lighting for many years, and in 2015 BMW has announced now that they are starting to produce the M4 GTS, with its OSRAM-made OLED taillights in very limited quantities.

BMW is yet to release a serial car with OLED lighting. The company's latest concept car, the Concept 8 Series, does use OLED taillights as can be seen in the photo above, though. The new car has lot's of new design ideas - and BMW aims to include about 80% of these when the car enters the production stage.

According to reports from Korea, Apple ordered a 2.5-Gen OLED evaporation (CVD) equipment from Sunic System in order to build an OLED pilot line in Taiwan. The report suggests that Apple wants to develop in-house OLED technologies which will allow it to reduce its reliance on Samsung Display.

6-Gen Sunic deposition system

It is interesting to hear how Apple is increasing its involvement with display technologies. We know that Apple is also interested and involved with Micro-LED displays, and earlier reports suggested that Apple actually aims to produce sample displays in a pilot R&D line later this year.

UBI Research estimates that the AR and VR market will grow to 96.4 million units and $58.7 billion in device sales by 2021. In 2017, 17 million units will ship generating $3.9 billion in revenues. From 2017 to 2021 the market will grow with a CARG of 54%.

According to UBI, the VR and AR market was split almost 50% between OLED and other technology displays, with 2.6 million OLEDs shipped in 2017. Most next generation VR headsets will use OLED displays, however, and by 2021 OLEDs will occupy 80% of the market.