November 2018

South Korean prosecutors indicted a group of 11 executives and employees of Korea-based Toptec, a Samsung Electronics supplier, accusing them with leaking Samsung's flexible OLED technology to Chinese display makers. The group includes Toptec's president and managing director.

According to Nikkei Asian Review, the Toptec's executives supplied the stolen information to four companies in China - including BOE and CSoT. The cost of the information was 15.5 billion Won - or almost $14 million USD. Toptec produces display production automated equipment.

DSCC says that the OLED market saw a strong recovery in shipments in Q3 2018 - with total revenues increasing 80% from Q2 2018 (and 45% from Q3 2017) to $8 billion. The largest OLED market is the smartphone display market - which reached $6.9 million in the quarter.

DSCC expects revenues to reach $8.2 billion in Q4 2018 - a decrease of 7% compared to last year (but an increase of 3% from Q3). The main reason for the decline is slower Apple iPhone sales. TV revenues continue to increase strongly - to reach $585 million in Q4 (up 80% from 2017). The fastest growth was in the wearables sector - which grew to $317 million.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Jilin University discovered that radical-based OLEDs feature highly efficient emission - in fact they believe that this discovery could be an elegant solution to the problem of in-efficient OLED emission.

First-generation OLED emitters (fluorescent emitters) have a maximum internal quantum efficiency of 25% - as only a quarter of the electrons are in a singlet-state (that emit light) while 75% of the electrons are in a triplet-state. Current ways to achieve 100% IQE are either based on doping with heavy metals (phosphorescent emission) or either based on delayed fluorescence (TADF).

In 2016 China-based Everdisplay (EDO) started to construct a 6-Gen flexible AMOLED fab in Shanghai. In August 2017 EDO said that it finished the building's main steel frame roof, and in July 2018 EDO started to install equipment.

Everdisplay now announces that the new production line has been successfully lit for the first time. It's not exactly clear what the company means by that, but progress seems to be going well and EDO says that trial panel production will begin in January 2019, as planned.

The OLED-Info team takes pleasure in recommending our new book - The Perovskite Handbook, which gives a comprehensive introduction to perovskite materials, applications and industry. We believe that any display professional would find that perovskite materials are an area of focus that should not be ignored.

Perovskites offer a myriad of exciting properties and has great potential for the display industry. The promising perovskite industry is currently at a tipping point and on the verge of mass adoption and commercialization and the first display-related perovskites are already reaching the market.

BOE's 1.4" round 454x454 AMOLED panels are now available on The OLED Marketplace. This is a high-end AMOLED display, suitable for smartwatch applications and more.

BOE started producing this display in 2017. This display was adopted, for example, in Fossil's Men Explorist smartwatch. If anyone is interested in these displays, let us know. Click here for more information on this panel.

CLSA says that as OLED displays are too expensive for many smartphone makers and lack enough differentiation to LCDs, the company is lowering its OLED adoption forecasts. CLSA now expects China's OLED smartphone shipments to total 116 million in 2018, 143 million in 2019 and 168 million in 2020. CLSA lowered its forecasts by 12-21%. In terms of penetration into the total Chinese smartphone market, CLSA sees 14% in 2018, 18% in 2019 and 21% in 2020.

Looking at the OLED makers, side, CLSA sees ample OLED supply in coming years, which means that expansion is likely to slow. CLSA assumed that OLED makers will achieve 70% yields and a utilization rate of 90%, which will bring all OLED makers to have a combined production capacity of around 288 million 6" panels in 2020. As demand will be only 168 million by Chinese phone makers (and remember there's also Samsung and LGD of course), this will create quite an oversupply situation in China. CLSA cuts its China OLED production forecasts by BOE, Tianma, Visionox, CSoT and Everdisplay by 23% to 26% in coming years.

Yeolight Technology (which was spun-off Visionox in May 2015) developed candle-shaped transparent OLED lighting panels. The segmented panels have five different lighting panels each with its own brightness. The total size is 11.26 x 26.26 mm (with a thickness of 1.05 mm).

Yeolight tells us that these new OLED candles has been developed for a customer that will soon ship its final product to the market. The panels are now in production.

The Fraunhofer FEP institute, the Holst Center and other partners have developed a 15-meter long OLED lighting panel, the longer OLED device ever (beating their own 2017 record of a 10-meter OLED). This work was done as part of the Lyteus, the EU's €14 million initiative within PI-SCALE.

The partners in this project say that this is the first OLED produced using a new unique roll-to-roll (R2R) process that combines the performance of an evaporated OLED stack with solution processing of auxiliary layers.

China-based display maker CSOT held a ceremony yesterday as it started construction on its upcoming T7 large-area display production fab. The T7 fab, which has a total cost of around 42.7 billion Yuan ($6.15 billion USD), will produce both LCD and OLED displays.

Total capacity in the T7 line will be 105,000 monthly substrates (according to our information, the OLED capacity will be 20,000 monthly substrates). The T7 OLED line will use IGZO backplanes and inkjet printing deposition. CSOT's plan is to start production by the end of 2020 - with real mass production starting in 2021.