Back in November 2011 AUO unveiled a 4" flexible AMOLED prototype. Today the same panel won the "Outstanding Photonics product award" at the Display Taiwan 2012 conference. Here's a video showing the display. You can skip to 2:43 if you want to see a closeup footage of the AMOLED panel, showing how AUO setup a nice mechanism that keeps bending it:

AUO's 240x320 4" panel is made on an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane, is a bottom-emitting device and it's only 0.3mm thick and can be bent with a curvature radius of 10mm.

Tianma was showing two AMOLED prototypes at SID: a 3.2" (320x480) and a 12.1" (1280x800). Those are direct-emission (side-by-side) panels built on an LTPS substrate, and they were looking rather good. These seem to be the same panels demonstrated in FPD china earlier this year.

The panels were produced at Tianma's pilot 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab in Shanghai. It was reported in 2010 that the pilot line's cost was $72 million (the Chinese government helped with $40 million in funding) and it is able to produce around 1,000 glass substrates in a month.

Sprint says that they got "overwhelming" demand for the Galaxy S3. So much in fact that they ran out of devices. Those who pre-ordered the 16GB model should recieve their S3 tomorrow, and 32GB pre-orders will ship next week. The S3 pre-order numbers were very strong according to Samsung, and it seems that the S3 is on track to becoming a very popular phone...

The US version of the S3 has a 4.8" 1280x720 HD Super AMOLED (with Pentile), a dual-core 1.5Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM 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.

Just before SID, the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) announced that they managed to fabricate the world's largest (7.4") flexible (bendable) OLED using Mixed-Oxide TFTs. Those MO-TFTs deliver high performance (fast switching speeds and reduced power consumption), are quite cost-effective and can be produced on existing a-Si production lines. The FDC demonstrated this panel at SID.

This OLED panel was developed with funding from the US Army features 480x360 (81 ppi) resolution, has an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and is built on a PEN (polyethylene naphthalate) substrate. It was developed in collaboration with Universal Display, DuPont (Teijin film), Sunic and Henkel.

It was a pleasant surprise to see Hyundai LCD (or HYeLCD as they like to be called now) at SID 2012. I thought the company is no longer in business (mainly due to the fact that their web site appears to be down for months now). Anyway they did have a booth, showing several LCD and PMOLED panels.

The PMOLED panels on show included a monochrome (16 gray levels) 1.46" 128x128 panel, a full-color 1.12" 96x96 panel and a small monochrome 0.91" 128x32 panel.

Dupont published some new OLED material specification, you can see them in the photo below. The lifetime (LT50) of their Blue fluorescent material is now over 33,000 hours (the the 0.14c0.13 blue, anyway) - which they say is good enough for OLED TVs. Their solution-processed materials are now more efficient than their evaporated-materials, but lifetime is probably lower (it's a bit hard to know since they only publish LT95 for those materials).

I had an interesting discussion with a Dupont employee involved in their OLED program. In January 2012 it was reported that the company is building a $30 million pilot production line for OLED TV displays using their new nozzle printing technology. It turns out that the report wasn't accurate - the facility that DuPont is building is a material production facility. They have no intention to start producing displays...

According to Digitimes, Samsung set a target of producing 200,000 55" OLED TV panels in 2012, in its 5.5-Gen fab. LG Electronics plans to make only 50,000 OLED TVs this year.

The same reports suggest that promotion for OLED TVs will being when the Summer Olympics start in August. Sales will being in South Korea an later on in the European and North American markets.

Corning's major announcement at SID was the new Willow glass product. This is an ultra-slim (50 um and 100 um) flexible glass that can support backplanes and color filters in both LCD and OLED panels. Willow glass can withstand temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius, and can be used in roll-to-roll production processes.

Corning says that in the near future Willow glass can be used to produce rigid OLEDs panels in processes that need flexible glass (such as roll-to-roll), and in the long term it may also lead to actual flexible panels based on glass. Glass have several advantages over plastics, mainly that it's a better barrier and it can result in better displays in terms of resolution, backplane speeds, etc. However the major disadvantage is that it can be shattered, unlike plastic-based displays.

Chimei Innolux had a nice booth at SID 2012, and I was given a nice tour of the booth by their PR people (who allowed me to take photos and videos even though they had a sign saying it ain't allowed). CMI's marketing guys were also kind enough to answer a few questions I had on their OLED program.

A few days before SID CMI announced that it will begin to produce 3.4" and 4.3" panels by Q4 2012. At SID I learned that the first OLED fab to go online is actually an old TPO/Toppoly 3.5-Gen fab. The panels will use LTPS backplane and will both feature 960x540 resolution (so it's 326 ppi on the 3.4" panel and 257 ppi on the 3.4" panel). CMI says that their technology is "ready" for 4.5" 720p (326ppi) panels as well.

Novaled is one of the most interesting OLED companies these days as it is getting ready for an IPO soon. 2011 was a good year for Novaled, with €17.4 in revenues and a profit of €1.2 million. The company is offering OLED technology licensing, consulting services and OLED materials. Samsung and LG Display for example, are using Novaled's materials, and someone once told us "everybody uses Novaled's materials".

Unfortunately, getting ready for an IPO also means that the company is currently unavailable to reveal new information... I visited Novaled's booth at SID, and indeed they couldn't tell me any news regarding the company, even ones that were revealed in the company's SEC filing. They did however exhibit several nice OLED lighting protoypes and products.