Power consumption

According to a new report by Business Korea, LG Display is finalizing the development of its 3rd-gen tandem-stack automotive OLED technology, and aims to start mass producing these panels by 2026. LGD believes the new panels will improve the brightness and efficiency of its OLEDs by 20% (compared to its current 2nd-gen tandem OLEDs).

LG Display believes it is leading the industry with its tandem OLED technology (and we tend to agree) and it hopes to accelerate its technology development to widen its lead. LG Display is enjoying a lead in the automotive display market with its OLED solutions and has already achieved design wins with many companies, including Genesis, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and GM.

OLED displays have been gaining popularity rapidly, and are already the dominant smartphone display technology. OLEDs are also the display technology of choice in the smartwatch market, making inroads into the TV, monitor, laptop and tablet markets. The future of the OLED industry looks bright.

In recent years, the focus of the industry, beyond increasing capacity and reducing production costs, has been improving the performance of OLEDs in the areas of display brightness, efficiency, and lifetime. Brightness is required in many applications - from TVs (for HDR and to view in ambient lighting) through smartphones (outdoor viewing) to automotive, and efficiency is a plus in any scenario (but mostly in mobile displays). Display lifetime is already good enough for many applications, but in some cases (like automotive, and IT displays) it is critical. These three properties usually go together - if you can make more efficient OLED displays, you can drive them at a lower current to achieve the same brightness, and so lifetime increases, or you can achieve higher brightness, etc. 

Researchers from Osaka University have found that thienyl diketone, a new organic molecule, shows high-efficiency phosphorescence, and one that is more than ten times faster than traditional organic phosphorescence materials. Such a material could hold promise for highly-efficient phosphorescence emission without the use of heavy metals. 

The researchers explain that phosphorescence occurs when a molecule transitions from a high-energy state to a low-energy state, and it often competes with non-radiative processes (i.e. heat generation instead of light). This competition with the non-radiative process leads to slow phosphorescence and lower efficiency. This is solved by adding heavy metal into the emitter - but this new breakthrough achieves fast emission without the heavy metal.

LG Display says that it has started to mass produce tandem OLED laptop panels, the first company to do so. LGD says its tandem architecture double the lifetime of its OLEDs, reduce power consumption by up to 40%, and enable up to three times the brightness.

LGD has been producing tandem OLED displays since 2019, mainly for the automotive industry. This expertise has enabled it to be Apple's main tandem OLED display suppler for its 2024 iPad Pro devices, and now to be the first one to produce tandem laptop panels. 

BOE had a large demonstration at Displayweek 2024, showing several display technologies and many new panels and prototypes.

First up we have a slidable OLED display, one of the largest we've seen, at 31.6". The display offers a resolution of 5944x1672, a sliding distance of just over 260 mm (BOE says its the world's longest) and a sliding radius of 5 mm.

The display industry's premier event, Displayweek, is over. We will now collect our notes, thoughts, photos and images and will share it all in the coming days. In the meantime, we'd like to detail some initial impressions.

Generally speaking, it seems as if the display industry is going through a phase of relatively little innovation, especially with the mature LCD and OLED industry segments. While it has been a very busy week, and attendance at the event seems high, the number of actual demonstrations and prototypes was not stellar and compared to previous years, the booths were smaller and some companies skipped the event this year or preferred to only show their latest displays in private settings. Some thoughts we have:

In 2014 Konica Minolta started constructing its groundbreaking R2R flexible OLED lighting fab. The project saw many delays and entered production later than planned, and KM started producing panels at low volume at around 2020. The company recently started to ramp up production, and today we hear of one of its first customers and partners, Sentry Enterprises.

Sentry, a fintech company, launched the Radiance card illumination platform, which enables credit card (and other payment card) issuers to offer a unique experience by using an OLED lighting panel embedded in the card. The OLED panel is produced by Konica Minolta. The card works without a battery, and the OLED panel is powered by the NFC receiver upon a transaction (a technology that was demonstrated by KM back in 2020).

Researchers from the University of St. Andrews in the UK, led by Professor Ifor Samuel and Professor Eli Zysman-Colman, identified the key processes controlling the efficiency of TADF OLED emitters under high brightness. This could assist material develops on their quest to design materials that maintain high efficiency at high brightness.

The researchers explain that OLEDs have lower efficiency at higher brightness, and in many TADF materials, the efficiency roll-off is severe, so that the high efficiencies achieved at very low brightness are not maintained at higher brightnesses needed for displays or lighting applications. For the first time, the researcher identified the key processes controlling the triplet population, and propose a figure of merit for efficiency roll-off.  

Researchers from the UK's Northumbria, Cambridge, Imperial and Loughborough universities developed a new Hyperfluorescence OLED emitter system based on a new molecular design, which is highly efficient and simple to produce.

The researchers explain, that in Hyperfluorescence  systems, the elimination of the Dexter transfer to terminal emitter triplet states is the key towards OLED efficiency and stability. Current devices rely on high-gap matrices to prevent Dexter transfer, which unfortunately leads to overly complex devices from a fabrication standpoint. The researchers developed a novel molecular design in which ultranarrowband blue emitters are covalently encapsulated by insulating alkylene straps.