Tag: oled

OLED gets Korean government boost

Posted on August 19, 2015 by - News

SONY DSCLG is closely collaborating with the Korean government to promote local manufacturing of OLED displays in a move which could see the cost of the technology fall.

LG announced yesterday that it was investing $10 billion in its flexible OLED and big-screen TV manufacturing and hoped to create an ‘OLED Value Chain’ to lower the currently high price of OLED displays.

OLED TVs are only produced by LG because of that manufacturing cost, is so high it makes the incredible image quality too expensive.

However the Korean government is concerned that South Korea’s decades-long leadership in displays is being challenged by the rapid rise of Chinese companies,

LG Display’s CEO, Han Sang-beom, told delegates at an event in Paju that industry growth was flattening. Threats from China are urging the country to find something new.

“I believe OLEDs are the right solution to help the country lead its rivals in the battle for next-generation displays,” he said.

The Korean government has identified OLED as a key export item for the country and the Korean trade ministry is set to provide serious tax incentives when purchasing equipment for OLED production from local suppliers.

LG believes this expansion in OLED manufacturing will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide around $35bn worth of production.

Korean trade minister, Yoon Sang-jick said that the Korean government will be active in providing more supportive measures to help the country maintain continued leadership in the global display industry even in OLEDs.

LG fights to make OLED more mainstream

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

tvLG will partner with Chinese and Japanese firms in a bid to make organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display televisions more acceptable to the great unwashed.

LG has not said who it is teaming up with or what its OLED partnership would mean for those signing up to it.

So far, its affiliate LG Display is the only panel maker that can mass-produce OLED TV panels, and Samsung and LG are the biggest proponents of the technology for the TV market.

The LG companies say OLED offers better picture quality and consumes less power than mainstream liquid crystal displays (LCD).

However, they are still more expensive than LCD televisions. Quantum dot technology, which has many of the advantages of OLED but costs less, could also undercut OLED TV sales.

Some Chinese TV makers like Skyworth Digital Holdings and Konka are using OLED, but analysts say the technology needs to be more widely used by manufacturers to take off.

Samsung has said it has no plans to make OLED TVs in the immediate future because the technology is not yet ready for mass consumption.

Sony said it would be open to using OLED displays for its televisions but nothing appears to have happened yet.

Inkjets could fix OLED TV manufacturing

Posted on February 12, 2015 by - News

lg-55-inch-oled-tvMIT boffins have developed a method to slash the cost of producing OLED screens by using inkjet printing techniques.

MIT spinout Kateeva has developed an “inkjet printing” system for OLED displays  that could cut manufacturing costs enough to pave the way for mass-producing flexible and large-screen models.

Kateeva co-founder and scientific advisor Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology, who co-invented the technology said it removes the barriers to wider adoption of OLED technology which are all related to the expensive process.

Dubbed YIELDjet, Kateeva’s technology platform is a giant inkjet printer. Large glass or plastic substrate sheets are placed on a long, wide platform. A component with custom nozzles moves rapidly, back and forth, across the substrate, coating it with OLED and other materials — much as a printer drops ink onto paper.

Another tool, which will debut later this year, aims to cut costs and defects associated with patterning OLED materials onto substrates, in order to make producing 55-inch screens easier.

Kateeva co-founder and CEO Conor Madigan claims that by boosting yields, as well as speeding up production, reducing materials, and reducing maintenance time, the system aims to cut manufacturing costs by about 50 percent.

The system is scalable, which is really important as the display industry shifts to larger substrate sizes, he said.

Samsung invests in new OLED plant

Posted on February 11, 2015 by - News

oldtvSamsung thinks that more people will be interested in buying its OLED TVs which spy on you and tell advertisers your doings.

The outfit has announced that it plans to write a cheque for $3.6 billion into making organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels.

A Samsung Display spokesman said that the new production line would mainly make medium and small-sized OLED displays for consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets. The investment would be made from 2015 to 2017.

The new line will initially produce curved panels like those on the Galaxy Note Edge, and eventually help win external customers which are becoming crucial to parent Samsung Electronics’ future earnings growth.

In addition to the planned OLED investment, Samsung is expected to start building a chip plant in South Korea sometime in the first half of the year. The company said in October that construction for this plant will be completed in the second half of 2017.

However it is likely that all this investment will cut back on Samsung’s total 2015 dividend payout and it is likely that share values will fall.

It is not the only one thinking of following this line. South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency said this morning that LG Display is adding capacity in an existing large-panel OLED production line.

 

 

British firm promises flexible displays

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

FlexEnable's prototype fabA company based in Cambridge claimed that by the end of this year it will produce properly flexible displays by the end of this year.
FlexEnable is aiming to position its OLED displays into mobile products, wearables, surface displays and imaging systems.
On its website it says that the display could be used on smartphones with wraparound displays that can open out into tablet size.  The material is flexible enough to be folded in half.
It also envisages including screens that are so flexible they can be built into clothes and follow the curves of the body.
It also sees its displays being built into both cars and aircraft designs, using complex curves and irregular shapes.
The technology also has medical uses, creating flexible x-ray sensors. The technology can be as thin as 25 nanometres. It provides reference kits to its clients so they can make their own products. The company also claims to have created graphene based displays.
FlexEnable is a spin off of Plastic Logic and believes its technology will become an element of the internet of things.

 

LG presses on with OLED

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

oldtvWhile the rest of the display world abandons plans for OLED as too expensive for the big screen, LG is hanging on to the technology.

LG Display has announced it will increase production capacity of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels for TVs.

LG Display and its sister company, LG Electronics, claim OLED TV will give them a competitive edge over rivals once the technology matures.

LG Display said it would more than quadruple the monthly production capacity of OLED TV panels to 36,000 units by the year-end from 8,000 currently.

The companies say OLED is far superior to the mainstay liquid crystal display (LCD) technology, offering better picture quality as well as lower power consumption.

However it admits that costs, however, are much higher, making OLED TVs several times more expensive than LCD sets. LG Electronics’ 65-inch ultra-high-definition OLED TV launched in South Korea last year was priced at $10,874, more than three times the price of a comparable LCD TV by the same company.

Samsung has given up on OLED, saying the technology is not ready yet for mass consumption. It has focused on quantum dot technology instead.

LG Display finished building a $640.58 million factory to increase production of OLED TV panels. The panel maker did not comment on its investment plans for 2015.

It is not as if LG is betting the farm on OLED, it is also launching its own quantum dot TVs alongside OLED products this year in what it says is a two-track strategy.

Top TV makers reject OLED

Posted on October 31, 2014 by - News

tv58Samsung and LG have decided that the world is not ready for OLED and the next generation of TVs will run on quantum dot technology.

The problem is that they can’t come up with a way of making OLED affordable for the mass market.

Quantum dot involves incorporating a film of tiny light-emitting crystals into regular liquid crystal displays (LCD). The manufacturing process is relatively straightforward and offers improved picture quality at much cheaper cost than using organic light-emitting diodes (OLED).

The manufacturers think that the resulting lower prices could help the technology catch on far quicker. One industry analyst estimated a 55-inch quantum dot TV would be priced 30 to 35 percent more than a current LCD TV, while an OLED TV could be 5 times more expensive.

LG’s 65-inch ultra-high definition OLED TV cost $11,350  which is a big problem.

The only real difficulty is that the quantum dot material comes from a small pool of suppliers, including Quantum Materials and Nanoco who are almost certain to jack up the prices as it might be in short supply.

Nanoco said a South Korean plant being built by partner Dow Chemical will start quantum dot production in the first half of 2015. Analysts believe the output is destined for a local client.

LG plans to make quantum dot TVs in addition to OLED TVs. Analysts regarded that a tacit acknowledgement that OLED needs more time for prices to come down before eventually becoming the new standard.

LG Chief Financial Officer Jung Do-hyun told analysts after the company reported earnings that OLED is the fundamentally superior product.

Samsung Vice President Simon Sung said that quantum dot is among many technologies under consideration.

Sony is the only major electronics manufacturer selling quantum dot TVs. Researcher DisplaySearch forecasts 1.95 million quantum dot TV shipments next year, for just 0.8 percent of the market, growing to 25.5 million by 2020. IHS Technology sees OLED TV shipments at 7.8 million units by 2019 from 600,000 in 2015.

 

Curved screens don’t yet make the grade

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

curvyA report said that even though products from Samsung and LG that use flexible OLED materials for displays, they’re not really curved screens yet.

Strategy Analytics (SA) said Samsung’s launch of the Note Edge last week and the LG G-Flex a few months back took curved screens one step closer to reality.

However, SA said that these smartphones are not really flexible screens but rather have curved rigid screens.

OLED screens offer a number of benefits over LCD screens because they are lighter, thinner and probably last longer.

But these devices are the precursors to truly flexible second generation screens which will offer new deisgn such as smartphones with tablet sized foldable screens.

“A number of challenges will need to be overcome,” said Stuart Robinson, director at Strategy Analytics. “More of the phone’s components need to be flexible to make a truly flexibile phone, not just the display. This includes the cover material, the batteries as well as the semiconductors and other components.”

Other challenges include tools and processes that will allow cost effective volume production, he said. The thinks it’s likely that flexible OLED displays will become the preferred display tech in products within the next 10 years.

OLED and LCD patent pecking set to continue

Posted on January 21, 2013 by - News, Products

fightLow profits within the LCD market born from cooperation between tech companies, will lead to a continuous spree of patent spats, an analyst has warned.

The comments from Bob Raikes, principal analyst  at Meko, come as yet another two companies went to war late last week over patent infringement claims. This time it was Samsung who went after its rival LG, filing a suit and seeking invalidation of its patents on LCDs.

However LG was not blameless in the spat, kicking off the fight last month when it raised  three patent infringement claims on LCD technologies against Samsung. In court documents filed last month in the Seoul Central District Court  LG pointed the finger at its enemy, claiming that the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 infringed on three different patents related to LG’s In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology.

This led Samsung to retaliate with a an intellectual property tribunal, where it moaned to the court that three LCD patents held by LG Display were invalid as a result of existing patents on the same technology.

The spat is just one of many to come from tech companies with patent infringement claims been thrown about left, right and centre.

Samsung has had its fair share, going to war with LG in the past as well as well publicised disputes with Apple in the US.

However, it seems the war within the LCD and OLED markets may continue.

“The period of the development of LCD has been a period of cooperation and
competition,” Mr Raikes told ChannelEye.

“Basically, everybody uses very similar technology, materials and equipment. As a
result the industry grew very quickly and costs came down very rapidly. However, nobody made any money.

“For OLED (and there are no other technologies currently on the horizon),
the companies are trying to make profit, so there is relatively little cooperation. They know this is going to be slower, but they don’t want a repeat of the financial mess that the LCD industry is in.

“LG and Samsung use different technology, materials and manufacturing
techniques and equipment. Sony & Panasonic & AUO are collaborating on parts
of the technology, but only parts. They use different materials and techniques to the two Koreans.

“All of them will fight over who is doing what to try to protect their uniqueness.”