SID Display Week dominated by OLED and Color
May 2016 – At the San Francisco SID Display Week event the business track highlighted the state of the industry and directions that are being followed. The highlight was the high growth being seen in the AMOLED marketplace. This is being driven by the high unit volumes of mobile devices. Correspondingly, the LCD marketplace was flat.
The technology behind the AMOLED displays is allowing them to become thinner and lighter with plastic lens units down to 0.6mm. These plastic lenses and substrates are also forming the foundation of the flexible and foldable displays. The electronics for these bendable products has progressed rapidly, but the mechanical issues dealing with creases and deformity being long term in the substrate materials rather than temporary. The thin plastic displays are expected to hit the market holiday 2016, but move to volume manufacturing in 2017 for mobile & wearable products.
A challenge for these displays is the cost and size. TVs are not as yet cost effective for using AMOLED. The pricing premium for the technology has to be under the LCD price + 30% to be market sustainable. To get to this price point, the industry capacity issue has to be resolved. Only Samsung has enough AMOLED capacity at this time to address the growing demand. The cost of a new Gen6 (approx 1500 by 1800 mm, or roughly 5 by 6 ft, at 0.7 mm and thinner sheets) fab that can sustain a nominal 30K/mo run rate of sheets is about $2B USD. These fabs will run current generation Electronics on Plastic by Laser Release (EPLaR) process technology.
Companies driving the use of advanced technology are not only mobile device providers, but also those in specialty markets. A speaker from Merck, a 350 yr old family owned business, discussed the need for advanced displays that can use specialty materials form the EMD Performance Materials group. These include products for the display industry such as High Speed Fluorosurfactant. This material has excellent environmental properties – it is non-toxic and will not bioaccumulate allowing it to be used for formulations according to the requirements of the Nordic Ecolabel and the EU Ecolabel.
Also on the materials side was the now universal acceptance of quantum dots (QD) as a method to increase the range of the color palate being shown. Several methods were being shown. The primary selection criteria for choosing a solution was not performance, as they are all very close, but the industrial design and use model. The QD solutions are available a direct doping of the LOD lens (still under development and has drift and stability issues), availability as a laminating film to go into the standard process or a and edge optics solutions for the light source. The use of QD results in an enhanced color space, almost covering REC2020, increasing contrast, and increased brightness. These solutions are in most QHD/4K TVs and the majority of HD TVs being manufactured today.
