Japan-based printed OLED developer JOLED demonstrated several new OLED displays at Finetech Japan last week. We already posted on these new OLEDs, and now we have photos of the new panels.

So first up is JOLED's first OLED TV panel. The 55" 4K (3840x2160, 80 PPI) panel offers a 120Hz refresh rate and a color gamut of 100% DCI (135% sRGB) and is printed on JOLED's Transparent Amorphous Oxide Semiconductor (TAOS) backplane.

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.

As expected, Apple launched three new smartphones. The 2018-2019 lineup includes the OLED iPhone XS and XS Max and the iPhone XR which uses an LCD display.

The iPhone XS is the successor to the iPhone X - this phone sports a 5.8-inch 1125x2436 flexible notch-type AMOLED display (produced by Samsung Display), 4GB of RAM and 64/256/512 GB of storage.

IHS posted an interesting article which details a new backplane technology that Apple is developing. So-called Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide (LTPO) combines both LTPS TFTs and Oxide TFTs (IGZO, Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide). LTPO is applicable for both OLED and LCD displays.

In LTPO, the switching circuits are using LTPS while the driving TFTs will use IGZO materials. This could lead to a power saving of around 5-15% compared to the currently-used LTPS backplanes. The main drawback of LTPO, however, is that the IGZO TFTs are larger and so the display density may be compromised. IHS says that Apple may introduce this into future iPhones - but it also says that LTPO will be limited to low-density displays at first which is a bit confusing.

In February 2018 it was first reported that Samsung Display is developing TV panels based on hybrid quantum-dots and OLED architecture (QD-OLED). Samsung later confirmed it is developing such technology, but with no immediate plans to commercialize it.

ETNews now reports that Samsung is now working to establish a pilot 8-Gen line for QD-OLED production. ETNews says that Samsung is collaborating with both Canon Tokki and Kateeva to develop the production equipment - apparently the OLED layers will be evaporated using Canon's machines while the QD filters will be deposited using ink-jet printing equipment made by Kateeva. Samsung aims to finalize the production line by the second half of 2019.

TCL announced that its CSoT Subsidiary (China Star, also known as Shenzhen Huaxing Photoelectric Technology) plans to establish an LCD+OLED TV fab in Shenzhen, China. The new fab will have a monthly capacity of 90,000 substrate - and will produce 65- and 75-inch OLED TVs in addition to 65-, 75- and 75-inch 8K LCDs, all on Oxide-TFT backplanes. The line will begin operation in 2021.

The fab will apparently have two different production lines. The LCD line will be a 11-Gen line (3370x2940 mm) while the OLED Line will use smaller 8.5-Gen substrates (although this is not clear, CSoT may aim to use the 11-Gen substrates for OLED deposition too, perhaps cutting these large substrates before the OLED processing. Total investment in this new fab will be 42.6 billion Yuan (or about $6.7 billion USD).

IHS Markit says that demand for Oxide-TFT backplanes has surged over 100% in 2017, led by both LCDs and AMOLED TVs. The demand is expected to continue its growth although at lower rates and will reach 6.8 million billion sqm in 2020 (up from 1.7 billion sqm in 2017).

OLED TV Oxide-TFT backplanes shipments (all from LG Display) grew 106% in 2017 while demand for LCD panels (mostly produced by Sharp) grew 98%, mostly led by Apple's adoption of Oxide-TFT LCDs in its iPads and notebooks.

US-based Solar-Tectic has launched a new low-temperature OLED backplane technology that could replace LTPS in future high-end mobile OLED displays and bridge the performance gap between IGZO and LTPS.

Solar-Tectic process, called LT1CS (Low temperature single crystal silicon) is a silicon based technology that creates highly oriented c-axis aligned or "textured" silicon crystals. Solar-Tectic says that the performance of LT1CS backplanes will be higher than IGZO performance. The company says that process is similar to SEL's CAAC-IGZO only based on silicon and not IGZO.

JOLED (Japan OLED) was established in August 2014 by Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic with an aim to become an OLED medium display (10-30 inch) producer. The company is aiming to start mass production in 2019, although some panels may ship in limited volume earlier.

Last week at Cebit 2017 JOLED demonstrated some of its latest OLED prototypes. In the photo above you can see JOLED's 21.6" 4K (3840x2160, 204 PPI) "medical applications" monitor. JOLED also demonstrated what seems to be the same panel for "consumer" application (they call this private viewing). The whole panel weighs just 500 grams and the color gamut is 130% sRGB.

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology developed new electron injection layer and electron transport layer materials suitable for OLED displays produced on IGZO backplanes. The new materials, based on transparent amorphous oxides, were found to increase the stability of the OLED device.

The new materials are transparent, and chemically stable. The can be adopted for use in web processes - which means that low-cost production processes are possible.