Ignis Innovation announced today that they developed and verified the second generation of the MaxLife driver IC - suitable for OLED TVs, monitors and tablets. Ignis wouldn't reveal the changes since Gen 1 - so it may be that the real issue here is support for larger displays.

The MaxLife driver enables AMOLED displays on a-Si, LTPS and Oxide-TFT backplanes. For LTPS and Oxide-TFTs, it offers better yields. For a-Si backplanes, it enables stable and high frame-rate displays.

Canada's Ignis Innovation posted new job openings for their OLED TV development group, and in the job description they mention that the group is "currently working on two AMOLED television designs, targeted for mass production in 2012".

3.5-inch a-Si AMOLED prototype

IGNIS developed a-Si based AMOLEDs and reportedly RiTdisplay is starting to mass produce AMOLEDs based on this design - but these are 3.5" (320x480) panels - it seems unlikely that they'll be able to scale up to OLED TV size in such a short time frame. But it's also unlikely that either Samsung or LG Display are using Ignis technology in their upcoming OLED TVs (which use LTPS and Oxide-TFT, not a-Si).

Researchers from Cambridge University and Ignis Innovation developed a new energy harvested that sits inside a mobile phone with an OLED display and harvests energy from the light that is projected to the display's sides. The researchers say that up to 64% of the light is lost in typical OLED displays - much of it projected to the edges of the display. The idea is simple - to place an array of thin-film hydrogenated a-Si solar cells around the OLED. These cells can also harvest ambient light.

The researchers made a complete system design - instead of charging the battery with the power generated (which would be quite complex) they added a supercapacitor for intermediate energy storage. They say the system achieves an average efficiency of 11% and peak efficiency of 18%, while the PV array converts around 5% of the ambient light to electricity. They say that on a typical 3.7" OLED display the maximum power output is 5 milliwatts. Useful, but not significant compared to the phone's power needs, so it's not clear whether this is worth the extra cost, size and weight.

There are reports that RiTdisplay started to mass produce 3.5" 320x480 AMOLEDs on a-Si backplanes, and the company was already contracted to provide the displays to several smartphone makers. a-Si backplane AMOLEDs will be cheaper and easier to produce than LTPS ones (which is the most common technology for AMOLEDs and next-gen LCDs such as Apple's Retina displays) as they can use existing a-Si equipment used to fabricate LCD displays.

Canada's Ignis Innovation provided the compensation technology and driver IC (which is made by Himax). These are the same panels unveiled at SID last month. The actual backplane was developed with an undisclosed display-panel maker partner in Taiwan.

Update: we learned that RiTDisplay have started to mass produce those AMOLEDs and have already found some smartphone clients.

IGNIS Innovation, unveiled a new 3.47" 320x480 AMOLED made on an amorphous silicon backplane (a-Si). The new display uses INGIS' new AdMo compensation technology and is made by RiTdisplay.

Today all AMOLEDs are made on LTPS backplanes. Ignis' solution uses a-Si which is cheaper but has stability issues. Ignis says that their new AdMo technology eliminates those issues - and makes the a-Si made AMOLED equivalent in performance to LTPS AMOLEDs. Ignis says that "This opens the door for RiTdisplay and other manufacturers to make state-of-the-art AMOLED displays using existing amorphous silicon equipment" - but they haven't announced when and if RiTDisplay (or other companies) plan to start using the technology.

IGNIS Innovation, in partnership with Kodak and Prime View International (PVI), has developed a 5" segment of a 32" OLED HDTV AMOLED display, using industry standard amorphous silicon thin film transistors (TFT). The prototype uses IGNIS' MaxLIfe solution, which compensates separately for both the TFT and LED degradation using only an electrical feedback - an industry first. This technology does not use any optical sensors which are unreliable.

IGNIS reports 20 years lifetime (when watching 12 hours a day), there is no burn-in images (the MaxLife technology keeps differential aging to 3% or less). The prototype was built using an amorphous silicon backplane from PVI using their standard a-Si LCD mass production process while the frontplane uses Kodak's long life and low power RGBW technology that delivers a vivid and outstanding viewing experience. They say that this combination provides the first reliable, low ost and scalable architecture.

IGNIS has also shown a 2.2" QVGA (181ppi) display module, using their AdMo (Advanced Mobile) compensation platform. They report over 50,000hrs lifetime (in house testing), large temperature range (-30c to 80c), suitable for automotive applications. The sophisticated compensation technology is built entirely in-pixel, meaning low-cost driver ICs are used, lending itself to a simple ‘drop-in’ display that is easily swappable into devices using legacy LCDs. The AdMo prototype use an amorphous silicon backplane, the standard TFT of the LCD industry that has traditionally been regarded as unusable for AMOLED displays. However, through its patented technology IGNIS is able compensate for the low mobility and in-stabilities of amorphous silicon, and as a result, for no additional capital investment costs, enables the manufacture of AMOLED backplanes at existing TFT plants.

IGNIS Innovation unveiled a prototype display using its Driver IC  MaxLife. The MaxLife solution compensates not only for the thin film transistor (TFT) degradation, but also for OLED as well.

IGNIS showed its prototype of a cutout of a 32 1080p HDTV, with an operating device lifetime of 75,000 hrs and no image burn-in over that period, which is equivalent to 20 years when watching for 10hrs/day.

The growth of the AMOLED industry has been constrained due to the technological hurdles associated with achieving a truly reliable, uniform and scalable TFT backplane. Our MaxLife platform now enables our customers, the display manufacturers, to accelerate their market introduction of large, visually stunning and affordable AMOLED HDTVs and other large area applications in the very near future, said Paul Arsenault, President and CEO of IGNIS.

There's a new OLED group that has just been formed - the OLED Association (OLED-A). The group is managed by Barry Young (Former senior VP, Display Search).

There are ten members in the group - Cambridge Display/Sumitomo, Corning, DuPont, Kodak, eMagin, Ignis, MicroEmissive Displays, Novaled, OLED-T, Samsung SDI, and Universal Display, and OLED-A are working to add more members.