The US Department of Energy (DoE) announced new SBIR and STTR grants for solid state lighting projects. The DoE announced five new grants out of which two are related to OLED technologies.

Pixelligent Technologies were awarded an SBIR project titled "Light Extraction for OLED Lighting with 3-D Gradient Index". This project will explore the application of a novel and unique 3D gradient index (GRIN) layer to improve the efficiency and lifetime of OLED devices. Using such a unique structure, OLEDs could be produced that achieve the theoretical maximum extraction efficiency.

Reserachers from Korea's KAIST institute developed a process to deposit OLED displays on textile substrates. The substrate uses fabrics made from several-micrometer-thick fibers. Using a planarization process the researchers created a fabric as flat as a piece of glass.

The OLED was deposited on this flat fabric using regular evaporation equipment. Using thin-film encapsulation, a lifetime of 1,000 hours was achieved. The textile OLED is much more flexible than a plasic based one, and may find uses in wearables. Of course the performance needs to be increased and this just a research project at this stage.

The Holst Centre, in collaboration with US-based ultra-thin ceramics supplier ENrG have managed to produce a flexible OLED lighting panel on a 20-40 um thick ceramic substrate. The researchers at the Holst Centre say that a ceramic substrate offers an excellent barrier, is easy to handle and can withstand the high temperatures used in display backplane manufacturing processes.

The Holst presented the 12 x 2.5 cm prototype OLED lighting panel that you see above. A ceramic substrate can withstand temperatures up to 1000 Celsius - and can be made partially transparent. This could prove to be an interesting alternative to plastic and metal substrates.

A China-based company (maybe called Interim, it's not clear) has demonstrated a new fully-bendable smartphone. The company claims that this smartphone has a "graphene-based screen", 5.2" in size.

It's not clear what the meaning of a "graphene-based" display is, in this case. While graphene can theoretically be used to make light emitting devices, it's highly unlikely that this is the case here. My guess would be that this is a flexible OLED display (could also be a flexible LCD, but that's unlikely) with a graphene-based touch panel.

According to reports, Samsung is gearing up to introduce their first foldable OLED smartphone device by the end of 2016, as Samsung's mobile phone unit is under pressure to innovate and recapture its lost market share.

According to an interesting report from Korea, Samsung has been collaborating with a KAIST spin-off called Solip Technology that developed a foldable glass that will be used in Samsung's upcoming foldable OLEDs. Samsung is considering placing a strategic investment in Solip as this material is a key technology for Samsung.

Corning announced that Samsung Display adopted the company's Lotus NXT glass as its OLED panel substrate. The Lotus NXT glass was announced in June 2015, and Corning reveals that that Samsung already adopted those substrates for the Galaxy Note 5's 5.7" Quad-HD (2560x1440, 518PPI) Super AMOLED display. The Note 5 was released in August 2015.

Lotus NXT improves the 2nd-gen XT glass (launched in May 2013) with lower total pitch variations. The new glass has improved stability, and better total pitch variation performance. According to Corning, this enables display makers to produce more efficient displays (up to 15% lower power consumption), or higher resolution displays (by up to 100 additional pixels per inch).

Taiwan's Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) signed an agreement with ITRI for a technology transfer for flexible AMOLED and touch panel integration (specifically ITRI's FlexUP flexible substrate technology - which is owned by FlexUp, encapsulation technology and flexible touch sensor technology).

CPT aims to use these technologies to achieve flexible OLED mass production "as soon as possible". Earlier today we posted that ITRI is set to demonstrate a 7" Full-HD foldable AMOLED prototype soon. ITRI and CPT has been cooperating on flexible OLEDs since 2012.

China's Guangzhou New Vision has been developing flexible AMOLED displays for a long time, and the company now unveiled its latest prototype. This 0.01-thick panel use a Polyimide substrate, an Oxide-TFT backplane and an RGB (direct emission) frontplane. The curvature radius is 4.5 mm.

New Vision's 2014 flexible AMOLED prototype actually used a PEN substrate - and it's interesting to see the coming moving back to Polyimide. Back in 2014 New Vision said that the flexible OLEDs will be commercialized "in the near future".

According to India Times, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras is seeking government funding to start a project to develop low-cost OLED production processes. The IIT estimate the project at Rs500 million (about $78 million).

The researchers at the IIT are looking at two technologies: a new patterning technology, and a silicon based substrate that will enable to integrate the backplane into the substrate and so lower costs.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is launching a new project called KONFECT that aims to develop flexible OLED glass for OLED applications. BMBF is awarded €5.6 million towards the three-year project that seeks to refine windable glass through lamination with functional adhesive tapes and by applying special functional layers.

The project consortium includes three partners - Schott, tesa and VON ARDENNE. Schott and tesa will develop reliable encapsulation by combining Schott's flexible glass with tesa's barrier tape while Von Ardenne will developing a vacuum coating system specifically for roll-to-roll (R2R) coating of flexible glasses.