Patents

Universal Display Corporation announced that it has acquired Merck's Phosphorescent OLED Emitter Intellectual Property (IP) assets. This portfolio includes over 550 issued and pending patents around 172 patent families with an average lifetime of 10 years, and represents over 15 years of R&D. 

The two companies also entered into a multi-year collaboration agreement, in which the two companies will create advanced PHOLED stacks based on UDC's OLED green and yellow emitters and Merck's transport and host materials.

According to Business Korea, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) launched a investigation to check whether BOE infringes Samsung's OLED patents. This is a second step in Samsung's' efforts to ban BOE's AMOLED panels in the US, following a request to ban aftermarket AMOLED panels in the US.

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This will be interesting to watch, especially as BOE aims to become a supplier for Apple's future iPhone displays.

This is a sponsored post by Nanomatch

Using their in-house virtual design tools, Nanomatch developed a new class of emitters that enables the production of stable, fluorescent OLED devices with close to 100% internal quantum efficiency also in the blue color range.

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The specific class of fluorescent emitters facilitates the generation of only singlets with radiative decay of the order of 10-8s, thereby eliminating quenching processes induced by long-lived triplets. Having filed the patent end of February 2023, Nanomatch is now looking for partners to commercialize this new concept in order to realize efficient, stable blue OLEDs on an industrial level.

Samsung Display has developed a new technology that enables multiple refresh rates in AMOLED displays. The idea is that one can create several zones in the display, each with its own refresh rate.

Driving at low refresh rates helps reduce the power consumption of the display and the new technology will be useful in scenarios in which a part of the screen needs high refresh rates (like video content embedded inside a web page).

In 2020 Kateeva lost Samsung's QD-OLED inkjet printing inkjet printing contact to Korea's Semes, which resulted in massive layoffs including some of Kateeva's executives.

In January 2022 it was reported that Samsung has decided to change course, and rely on Kateeva's inkjet printers in its 2nd QD-OLED production line, as the Semes printers do not perform as well as Samsung hoped.

The Korean Supreme court put an end to a years-long legal battle between LG Display and Samsung Display, saying that SDC's employees and a chief executive of one of LG's suppliers are not guilty in IP theft.

The supreme court upheld the original ruling and dismissed the appeal. The case revolved around LGD's face seal encapsulation technology for OLED displays. The main issue in the legal case was whether leaked LGD documents were trade secrets. The employees and executives were first found guilty, but at a higher court they were found innocent as it was decided that the information was already widely known in the industry.

An interesting report from Korea suggests that Apple's CEO met with Samsung Display's CEO recently, as Apple is looking to reduce its OLED iPhone orders from Samsung by around 15% in 2022.

Apple, like the rest of the technology industry, is facing supply constraints and has already said that it won't be able to meet the demand for its products in 2022. Apple's original plan was to produce 220 million iPhones in 2022, and it expected to order 160 million iPhone AMOLED panels from SDC. Apple's now expects to ship only 185 million iPhones.

The Elec reports that Korea-based LORDIN is progressing with its blue OLED emitter technology. The company recently filed for a high-efficiency blue OLED emission patent, and according to the company's plans it aims to have a commercial blue OLED emitter out in 2024.

Not much is known about LORDIN's technology, beyond a statement by LORDIN that says it aims to achieve over 90% IQE, and that it is based on the control of energy transfer speed between emitter molecules. the energy transfer speed between molecules inside the material to increase efficiency.

In 2016, Researchers from Japan's Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) announced a new OLED device architecture, called ExTET ('exciplextriplet energy transfer'), that can increase the performance of OLED devices. The technology was applied for a patent in 2011.

The ExTET technology, which is a modification of the host material and the EML layer in phosphorescent OLED devices, have since been introduced to commercial AMOLED panels, increasing the efficiency and lifetime of the materials, while also lowering the drive voltage.

Ireland-based OLED IP company Solas OLED announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Nintendo and Samsung Display in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.

Solas says that the Nintendo Switch OLED infringes four of Solas’ U.S. patents: 7,499,042; 7,573,068; 7,868,880; and 7,663,615 that relate to the 7-inch OLED display, produced by SDC.