Last month OLED microdisplay maker eMagin announced that the company received a $5.5 million award from the US Department of Defense to improve eMagin’s OLED microdisplay manufacturing capabilities - which was a first phase in a three phase program.

The DoD yesterday published the full project, a Defense Production Act Title III agreement with eMagin that has a total funding of $33.6 million (this excludes the $5.5 million announced before). The DoD wants eMagin to sustain and expand its critical industrial base production of OLED microdisplays. This project is part of the US national response to COVID-19.

LG Display's original plan was to start producing OLED TV panels at its 8.5-Gen OLED fab in Guangzhou in October 2019, but following some technical issues, production was pushed back, several times.

Yesterday LGD announced that it has finally started mass production of its Guangzhou fab. The capacity of the Guangzhou fab is 60,000 substrates per month, which will almost double LGD's total OLED TV capacity to 130,000 substrates per month.LGD also plans to expand the Guangzhou fab to 90,000 monthly substrates in the future. The plant will be used to produce 48-inch, 55-inch, 65-inch, and 77-inch panels, and 48-inch OLED TVs will shortly start to ship.

OLED microdisplay maker eMagin posted its preliminary revenues for the second quarter of 2020 and backlog at June 30, 2020. eMagin estimates that revenues in Q2 2020 will be between $7.4 million to $7.7 million, a 38-44% increase from Q2 2019 and 10-15% increase from Q1 2020.

eMagin says that it has seen improvement in demand from both its military business and its consumer or commercial programs. The company's backlog as of June 30 was $14.8 million.

This is a sponsored post by Lumtec

Lumtec, a leading OLED materials manufacturer, announced newly developed Hole Insertion layer (HIL), Electron Transport Layer (ETL) and Electron Insertion Layer (EIL) OLED materials. Lumtec says that its patented new materials offer high efficiency and can be used in both OLED displays and lighting panels.

Lumtec has been developing OLED materials for over 20 years, and aims to provide cost-competitive and high performance pure OLED materials. The company also helps its customers with custom synthesis of OLED materials.

According to a report from Korea, BOE will start producing AMOLED displays with on-cell touch, and ship the first such panels to Huawei to be used in its Mate 40 flagship smartphone. The Mate 40 is expected by October 2020, and BOE will start producing these panels soon.

Huawei Mate 30 Pro

BOE is not the only OLED maker to supply to Huawei's Mate 40 series - Korea's Samsung and LG Display will also ship similar panels to Huawei, some of these will use on-cell touch and some will use add-on touch panels, this depends on the Mate 40 model.

Japan Display says it is developing a new OLED production technology that will enable higher resolution and higher efficiency OLED displays, and the company is in talks with potential customers regarding a joint investment in producing next-generation OLEDs.

According to JDI's CEO, the company is using a new manufacturing technology that is different to the evaporation method currently used by OLED makers. It is not clear what is meant by that - it could be an inkjet-printing technology (but achieving high resolution for smartphone displays with inkjet printing is a challenge) or something like OVPD or OVJP - or a new technology developed in-house at JDI.

Omdia (IHS Markit) updated its forecast for the 2020 OLED market - and the company now sees the market contracting 1.2%, to 465 million panels, as demand for high-end smartphones is falling.

In April 2020, Omdia saw an increase of 9% in demand for OLEDs - 512 million panels, up from 471 in 2019, even though it already forecasted a fall in demand for smartphone.

Universal Display established a new subsidiary, called OVJP Corporation, that will advance the commercialization of UDC's OVJP OLED TV manufacturing technology.

OVJP stands for Organic Vapor Jet Printing, and the basic idea is to use a gas-stream based process that resembles ink-jet printing but one that uses evaporation OLED materials. In an OVJP process, the OLED materials are evaporated into a carrier gas that delivers them to a jet engine for direct printing of patterned OLED layers.

UBI Research estimates that Samsung Display's flexible OLED shipments to Chinese device makers will triple in 2020, and will reach 47 million units (up from 15.5 million in 2019). Rigid OLED shipments to China will drop from 135 million in 2019 to 110 million in 2020.

In total, SDC's flexible OLED panel production will reach 155.5 million in 2020, up 34% from 2019. This follows a couple of years of declining volumes (152 million in 2017, 129 million in 2018 and 116 million in 2019).

It came to our attention that a couple of months ago, Taiwan-based INT Tech signed an agreement to establish an OLED display fab in the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, China. The total investment in the project will be 1 billion Yuan (around $143 million USD) and the local government will support the project.

INT Tech developed a proprietary glass-based high pixel density OLED technology - which enables ultra high-resolution displays on glass TFT backplanes. The company is aiming to produce lower-cost and higher-performance microdisplays for the AR/XR markets.