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The display backplane is the grid of thin-film transistors (TFTs) sitting behind the pixels, switching and feeding each one. It is one of the major constraint on what an OLED display can do, and is also the component that actually consumes (or wastes, really) most of the energy, more than the OLED emitters themselves.

This article is the first in a new seven-part series that will offer a practical guide to the backplane technologies of today, and of the future. Across the parts we explain how each one works, how it is manufactured, which products use it, and where its roadmap is heading. The journey runs from the simplest displays of all to the most advanced backplane in development today:

• Part 1: Introduction to the series, and PMOLED (the backplane-free OLED).
• Part 2: a-Si: the backplane that built the LCD industry but could never power OLEDs.
• Part 3: LTPS: the laser-crystallized silicon that finally drove OLED.
• Part 4: Oxide TFT (IGZO): the scalable, low-power newcomer.
• Part 5: LTPO: the flagship hybrid TFT that enables VRR
• Part 6: HMO: high-mobility oxide, the future industry backplane?
• Part 7: Organic TFTs and silicon CMOS microdisplay backplanes

In our OLED history article series, we look back 20, 10, and 5 years ago, and revisit the history of the OLED industry. We hope these articles are nostalgic, and fun - but also informative - by reflecting on the past, we can better understand how far the industry has come and where it is headed.

20 years ago - Q3 2006

In the summer of 2006 the OLED industry was still tiny, built mostly around PMOLED displays for mobile sub-displays and music players, while AMOLED makers were still wrestling with yields.

A good snapshot of the era: DisplaySearch reported that at the end of Q2 2006, OLEDs held just a 3.5% share of the small/medium display market, with AMOLED producers still struggling to ramp up production.

Visionox is one of China's pioneering AMOLED producers, and arguably the industry's most technically ambitious second-tier player. Grown out of an OLED research group at Tsinghua University, the company built mainland China's first PMOLED line, its first AMOLED pilot line, and its first dedicated Gen-5.5 AMOLED mass-production line, and it currently holds somewhere around 10% of the global smartphone AMOLED market. By the end of 2024 it had shipped more than 240 million OLED panels cumulatively.

Yet Visionox is also the cautionary tale of the OLED industry. It is the smallest of the OLED focused panel makers, and the only major producer that remained loss-making in 2025, having accumulated roughly $1.2 billion in net losses over three and a half years. In late 2025 a Hefei government investment arm stepped in with a ~$410 million cash injection that made it the company's largest shareholder and de facto controller — a rescue that underlines both the strategic value Beijing places on a homegrown OLED champion and the financial fragility of the business itself.

That tension — between genuine technology leadership and a balance sheet under severe strain — runs through everything Visionox is doing right now, above all its $7.6 billion bet on an 8.6-Gen fab that will be the first in the world to attempt maskless OLED production at scale. In this article, we detail Visionox's history and corporate structure, its market position, its AMOLED capabilities and fabs, its ViP and pTSF technologies, its 8.6-Gen and microLED roadmaps, and its stock performance, opportunities and challenges.

We're excited to launch Bright Side with Brannan, a new column by Prof. Alexander Brannan of the University of Manchester. In this column, Prof. Brannan will explore the science behind OLED technology — the materials, the physics, and the open questions driving the field forward. The following article is the first in the series.

OLED emitter materials are currently dominated by closed-shell compounds. This means their occupied molecular orbitals, including the highest occupied molecular orbital, or HOMO, are fully occupied by paired electrons in the ground state. In other words, there are no unpaired electrons.

This electronic structure underpins the conventional OLED emitter families: fluorescent, phosphorescent, and thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters. In each case, the excited states are usually described within the traditional singlet and triplet framework.

When China published its 15th Five-Year Plan (FYP, 2026–2030) in March 2026, many assumed that the display industry had been handed another wave of state-level support. The assumption was understandable — but it requires a more careful reading.

A Chinese five-year plan is the country’s central blueprint for economic and social development over a five‑year period, setting binding and indicative targets that guide policy, investment, and regulation at every level of government. First introduced in 1953 and inspired by Soviet-style planning, these documents have evolved from rigid production quotas to a hybrid system that combines market mechanisms with state-directed priorities in areas such as technology, industry upgrading, environment, and social welfare. 

This article examines what the plan does and does not say, what it means for Chinese display investment, the implications for Korean display makers, and how alternative geographies — Japan, India, and the United States — are positioning themselves following this new plan.

Towards the end of 2025, we believed that 2026 will be another year of increased AMOLED panel shipments, even without taking into account the two new 8.6-Gen IT OLED Lines that are expected to begin production. But as 2026 started, everyone started to realize that macro constraints are starting to shape OLED panel demand, and the AMOLED market started to contract.

The clearest example is memory. DRAM and NAND prices are both rising sharply, due to AI datacenters demand. This increased the cost of smartphone production, which led to a lower demand - some analysts estimate that smartphone shipments will fall around 10-14% in 2026. The main problem lies in low cost smartphones that already suffer from low margins. For OLED makers, the problem is even worse - as some brands are switching to lower cost LCDs in their budget and mid-range smartphones.

In this article we examine the three new macro constraints that are shaping the OLED industry in 2026, why this matters now more than it did in previous cycles, what we learned from the post-COVID IC shortage, the return of LCDs, which OLED segments are more resilient, and deeper implications for the next chapter in the OLED industry's growth story.

Recently, we have started to witness a new trend in the display manufacturing equipment industry - companies that supply deposition systems to OLED fabs are now actively developing, testing, and commercializing equipment for perovskite solar cell production. The same is true for OLED material makers.

In this article we introduce the perovskite industry and market, discuss the perovskites production process, talk about OLED process companies and material developers active with perovskites, and give advice to industry players.

Several companies, including Sunic System, Jusung Engineering, and Suzhou Precision Systems (SPS) have already finalized their R&D, and secured perovskite equipment contracts. This is not coincidental. The technological DNA of OLED deposition — vacuum chambers, large-area thin-film coating, precision moisture control, encapsulation — maps almost perfectly onto the manufacturing requirements of perovskite devices. At the same time that interest in perovskites is at an all time high, the OLED equipment market is entering a plateau phase and future investments are uncertain. For equipment makers, the timing could not be more deliberate.