Taiwan's RiTDisplay, one of the world's leading PMOLED makers, is reportedly seeing strong demand for its OLED displays. According to a new report, the company's revenue reached $31.2 million in the first half of 2016, up 40% over the first half of 2015.

The company is also enjoying higher profits - and in fact the profit in the first half of 2016 may pass the profit from the whole year 2015. PMOLED is seeing a rising demand in wearable devices - and other emerging applications.

It turns out that two months ago RiT Display demonstrated two new flexible PMOLED prototypes - one "fixed curved" and one bendable. You can see the bendable panel below:

According to Touch Display Research, RiT Display aims to start mass producing flexible PMOLEDs by the end of 2015.

The OLED Lighting Commercialization Alliance (OLCA) was formed a few days ago in Taiwan, with an aim to make Taiwan an important OLED lighting player. The alliance will promote OLED technologies and will include members from materials suppliers to product makers.

The OLCA seems to be led by Taiwan's ITRI. Other members include Merck, RiT Display, WiseChip, Corning, Tongtai Machine & Tool and the TLFEA (Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association). ITRI says that more than 60 companies have shown interest in collaborating with OLCA members.

Taiwan has a large display industry, but in recent years it seems that it is lagging behind Korea, Japan and China in AMOLED technologies. We asked a local industry expert to check out the three main Taiwanese AMOLED companies (AUO, Innolux and RiTDisplay), and now we post on his updates.

AUO

As we reported already, AUO started producing AMOLEDs in their 4.5-Gen fab in Singapore after years of delays. According to our source, AUO is actually only producing samples. Those 5" 720p (295 ppi) panel samples have been been submitted to a company based in China. Earlier reports suggested AUO is going to supply HTC and Sony but it appears these two companies will keep using LCDs for now.

Back in December 2012, rumors started to circulate about an upcoming Apple smartwatch called the iWatch. First we heard reports that it will use a small PMOLED, and later rumors suggseted Apple decided to use a plastic flexible OLED. Today the Korea Herald claims that LG Display is very close to striking a deal with Apple to supply flexible OLEDs for the iWatch.

Apple 2011 flexible OLED watch patent

Korea Herald says that it isn't likely for Apple to rely on a single vendor and they suggest that RiTDisplay is a strong candidate as well. But this does not seem likely as the Taiwanese company does not have the technology or capacity to produce flexible AMOLEDs similar to LGD ones. Perhaps if Apple opts for a simpler PMOLED device than RiTDisplay is a possible supplier. They also list Japan Display as a candidate, but this is even less likely.

Ignis Innovation announced that samples of its 20" 1296x768 (XGA) AMOLED display will be available in August 2013. Ignis will offer these samples to display makers for evaluation of Ignis' MaxLife compensation technology in their own displays (more on this below). They will sell the display for low volume, demanding applications such as medical imaging and scientific imaging.

The 20" AMOLED panels use a-Si backplane and are made by RiTdisplay. The panels are only 1.3mm thick (the complete display module is 3 mm thick). The refresh rate is 240Hz.

Back in December 2012 we posted a new Apple OLED rumor - about the iWatch: a bluetooth smart watch that has a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay. In February 2013 the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both posted about this rumor.

Today these rumors resurfaced. This time Taiwan's Economic Times reported that Apple had made some prototypes with a 1.8" PMOLED, but decided they were too large. Now they are testing 1.5" PMOLEDs, and have ordered a thousand units from Foxconn - for internal experimentation.

A couple of months ago we posted about a rumor claiming that Apple is working on a PMOLED Bluetooth smartwatch. Now the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both posting a similar story, which actually gives this rumor some credibility. This time they say that Apple is working with their long-time manufacturing partner Hon Hai Precision Industry.

We're not sure what is meant exactly by "curved glass". We have seen devices with curved rigid glass before (for example the Nexus S). The New York Times speculates that the new iWatch will use Corning's flexible Willow glass (shown in the video below) - and so probably the whole display will be curved, maybe something similar to the prototypes Samsung unveiled at CES.

Apple OLED rumors never die. This time these are rather different rumors. According to a Chinese tech blog, Apple and Intel are jointly developing a bluetooth smart watch. This new iWatch (or whatever they'll call it) will have a 1.5" touch PMOLED, apparently made by RitDisplay.

I'm usually quite skeptic on Apple AMOLED rumors, because there's still not enough AMOLED capacity to be used in iPhone or iPod devices. But ramping up PMOLED capacity shouldn't' be a problem for RiTDisplay (which used to have larger capacity than today, but they shut down some lines due to financial problems). Anyway, if this is true, it's great news for my friends over at RiTDisplay.

As I already said before, Ignis Innovation's SID booth was one of the conference highlights for me. Their technology is very impressive and hopefully will enable cheaper non-LTPS AMOLED production.

In their booth, Ignis were showing 3.5" and 20" AMOLED panels that use the company's a-Si backplane compensation technology. The panels were made by RiTdisplay. Ignis and RiTdisplay have been showing these displays back in 2011. Originally they were supposed to be released towards the end of 2011, but this never happened. During SID Ignis announced that now the plan is to release these by the end of 2012. According to Ignis the 3.5" AMOLED will be cheaper than the LTPS-based competition (i.e. Samsung made panels). You can read more about these panels and RiTdisplay's plans at my RiTdisplay-at-SID-2012 post.