June 2012

There are reports that the Korean police is investigating a new case of OLED technology leakage - this time by Israeli company Orbotech's local Korean branch. Six Orbotech employees are suspected of leaking AMOLED (and WRGB, or WOLED) technology from LG Display and Samsung to several Chinese and Taiwanese companies.

According to the prosecution, Orbotech's employees photographed circuit diagrams of LG's and Samsung's 55" OLED TV panels when they visited the company's factories to check defects of inspection equipment. The images were stored on portable memory cards, slipped into their shoes, belts and wallets, and later relayed to display-making rivals.

Mitsubishi announced they completed the installation of Japan's largest digital signage system at Narita international airport in Tokyo (announced in October 2011). The system includes a 160-degrees concave Diamond Vision OLED display called Panorama Vision. This cool display measures 9.6 x 1.9 meters and is made from 2,000 96x96mm PMOLED panels.

This is Mitsubishi's third Diamond Vision OLED installation that we know about. The first one was a 3.84x2.3 meter display installed at Merck's research center and the second was the 6-meter Geo-Cosmos sphere installed at Tokyo's Science Museum.

Update: Philips told us that the interactive mirror will actually cost only €1,500, and will be available in September. Update 2: The mirror is now available, but for €2,990 - quite more than Philips promised...

After teasing us for almost a month, Philips finally launched their new modular 3D OLED system, the Livingscrulpture 3D. It's a kinetic system based on modular OLED blocks. The rectangular Lumiblade panels are placed on rods that can change their height - thus easily creating 3D surfaces.

The system consists of base plates, each one holding 16 OLED panels (4x4). The OLED themselves are rectangular, 76x76 mm each (including the frame, the active area is 61.4x60.5 mm) and the color temperature is 3,000K. The typical luminance per OLED is about 1,500 cd/m². The base panel size is 316x316 mm.

ITT Exelis Corporation have won a $49.5 million contract from the US army to supply display beam combiner assemblies (DBCA) for the Spiral Enhanced Night Vision Goggles (SENVG) program. Those assemblies include eMagin's OLED-XL full-color microdisplays, and eMagin's part of the contract has a potential value of $3.6 million. Deliveries are planned from mid-2012 through mid-2013.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my visit to eMagin's booth at SID 2012 and my meeting with eMagin's CEO, Andrew Sculley.

There are reports that Coasia Microelectronics (a Samsung component distributor) is expected to get new AMOLED panel orders from several Chinese handset makers. Coasia is currently in talks with Xiaomi, Oppo, Gionee and two other companies. Shipments to the Chinese vendors are expected to start later in 2012, and the deals are estimated at several hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Oppo already has an AMOLED phone, the Finder. It's the world's slimmest smartphone at 6.64mm and it features a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display. Pre-orders are now available for ¥3,999 (about $630).

RIM is getting ready to launch their new BlackBerry 10 operation system and the first devices that use it. A new leaked slide suggests that the new N-Series (with the QWERTY keyboard) will feature a square 720x720 2.8" AMOLED display. The pixel density is high at 330 ppi (it's likely that it uses Pentile tech). CMI has shown 326ppi OLEDs as well, but they will not have the capacity needed for RIM).

Apparently the N-series will be released in Q1 2013. Although this is a rather small AMOLED displays, it'll be great to finally see the first Blackberry with an OLED. Note that the slide says that future N-Series generation may revery back to LCD panels.

Update: in mid-July Samsung confirmed that they have shipped over 10 million S3 phones, a slight delay but still a very good rate...

Samsung estimates that it will ship 10 million Galaxy S3 phones by July. They say it's hard to keep up with the demand to the new phone, and the company didn't secure enough mobile components. There are concerns that sales will be lower then expected in the current quarter, although Samsung's mobile chief says that supply issues will be resolved next week.

The S3 has a 4.8" 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED (with Pentile), a quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU (1.5Ghz dual core in the US), 1GB of RAM (2GB in the US) and an 8 mp camera (1080p video) and lot's of new software features. The phone weighs 133 grams and is only 8.6 mm thick.

Sony and Panasonic announced today that the two companies will jointly develop technologies for OLED TV panels mass production. According to the release, they will develop printing based technology, which will enable low-cost mass production. They plan to establish the technology during 2013, by integrating their unique technologies.

Sony XEL-1

Sony and Panasonic will also "study" collaboration of OLED mass production. The current plan is for each company to develop and commercialize its own OLED panels, but it's possible that they will also jointly produce the panels in the future.

During SID, the Fraunhofer IPMS unveiled their bi-directional OLED microdisplay evaluation kit - which comes with a demo unit and software API so you can design your own application. The HMD is see-through and features eye-tracking, all of this from a single OLED device. The kit costs around €11,000 euro (almost $14,000).

The application they were demonstrating at SID showed a map of the world. If you looked in some directions, the map moved. I couldn't actually get this to work myself... but apparently this system works great for others, as they won the Best of Show at SID.

There are reports that CPT (Chunghwa Picture Tubes) has setup a small-size experimental line for AMOLED panel production development. We do not have more information about that line or CPT's OLED program yet.

CPT is a Taiwanese LCD and CRT producer.