A few days ago, the US Energy Department (DoE) announced its tenth round of efficient SSL lighting awards, awarding more than $8.2 million to nine projects. Today the DoE released more details about the projects it awarded in this round. There are four OLED projects, awarded a total of $3.8 million.

Acuity Brands received $455,131 to develop an OLED Luminaire with integrated DC current drivers in each panel and advanced controls. The goal is to demonstrate a luminaire with an efficacy of 65 lm/W and a luminous output of 4,000 lumens.

Corning and OLEDWorks signed a collaborative agreement to develop flexible and conformable OLED lighting solutions using Corning's flexible Willow Glass as an integrated substrate and barrier.

Corning's Willow Glass will not just enable the panels to be flexible - the glass also integrates Corning's light extraction technology that will (according to OLEDWorks) enable them to double the light output from the panels.

According to IHS, the OLED TV market will see slow growth unless producers manage to apply new technologies - mainly printing processes based on soluble materials and flexible substrates. If both technologies are to be adopted, IHS sees OLED TV shipments reaching almost 40 million units in 2023.

In the chart above, IHS Uses three cases. In Case 1, OLED TV makers use glass substrate and an evaporation process. In case 2 they adopt a printing process and soluble materials, and Case 3 assumes a flexible substrate is used as well.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) awarded two small-business SBIR Phase-2 projects targeting advances in solid-state lighting technology, and both projects deal with OLED lighting technologies.

The first project, led by Pixelligent Technologies is titled "Advanced Light Extraction Material for OLED Lighting". Pixelligent, in collaboration with OLEDWorks, will demonstrate a new internal light extraction structure for OLED lighting panels, that is fully compatible with current manufacturing processes and operating conditions. The ILE structure is cost-effective and offers a high high refractive index.

Taiwan's ITRI institute transferred its flexible substrate material technology (FlexUP) to a new spin-off startup called FlexUP Technologies, that will commercialize this technology for flexible displays and sensors. The FlexUP material can withstand high temperatures (which makes it well suited for the automotive and medical markets) and can be used in current production lines. ITRI says that FlexUP is expected to raise over NT$1 billion (over $32 million USD).

ITRI recently demonstrated several new AMOLED prototypes - a 6" full-color foldable OLED, a flexible AMOLED with integrated on-cell capacitive touch and a monochrome panel that can be tri-folded both in-wards and outwards (this is shown in the video above).

Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) developed the world's thinnest glass plate (only 30 um thick). The G-Leaf glass can be used as a substrate for flexible OLED displays, and NEG demonstrated a flexible OLED that is only 90 um thick (sandwiched between two G-Leaf sheets).

NEG uses their "overflow method" technology to manufacture the new glass plates. Reportedly the glass feels like a plastic film and does not break even when crumpled (see photo below).

Nippon Electric Glass and Saint-Gobain established a new company called OLED Materials Solutions to develop, manufacture and market glass substrates with internal extraction layers for OLED Lighting panels.

NEG already developed several glass substrates for OLED lighting. The company is currently sampling their new HX-1 glass which is a high refractive index glass.

Fraunhofer COMEDD is looking to advance flexible OLED lighting device lifetime, and towards that goal the German institute developed flexible OLED lighting panels on flexible glass substrates. COMEDD reports that flexible glass can enable curved panels that has high OLED lifetime - much higher than can be obtained with polymer-based encapsulation and substrate technologies.

Fraunhofer developed those new panels on their own Roll-to-Roll R&D line in collaboration with Von Ardenne (on the development of process equipment) and Nippon Electric Glass (they provided the "G-Leaf" flexible glass rolls). The G-Leaf glass is less than 35 um thick and can be used in roll-to-roll processes.

LG Display posted a very interesting article explaining their flexible OLEDs, and giving some predictions (based on IHS DisplayBank estimates) about the flexible OLED market. A couple of months ago LG already stated that they see a very bright future for flexible OLEDs and they intend to take the lead in this emerging display market.

So first of all, LGD explains the structure of their flexible OLED panel (see below). It is based on a plastic (polyimide) substrate as we already know, and LG gives some more information about their Face Seal method which was discussed before but with very little details.

Update: It seems to me that Samsung did clarify this issue saying that this is not a glass-based display, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

On October 9th, Samsung launched the world's first device with a flexible OLED display, the Galaxy Round smartphone - with it's curved 5.7" Full-HD flexible Super AMOLED. Strangely Samsung does not refer to this display as a YOUM display, which is the brand name for plastic-based OLEDs they launched at CES 2013.

In their PR, Samsung also never mentioned that this display is "unbreakable" - which is one of the biggest advantages of plastic-based OLEDs. Samsung's design is also much less exciting that the design prototypes they unveiled at CES that used a YOUM display. A couple of weeks ago I thought that perhaps this display uses a glass substrate and not a plastic one, which will explain everything. I checked with my sources and they said that it is using plastic and this is a YOUM display.