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New Solutions for Next Generation OLED TV Display

7/30/2019

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OLED as an emissive display is at the forefront of next generation TV technology due to its superior performance compared to traditional backlight based LCD technology. But its adoption rate in the TV industry has been limited due to higher cost, low production volume and other challenges. LCD still has the dominant market share.
The mature TV market needs lower price, larger screen sizes, higher resolution and higher performance products to drive replacement demand. OLED display technology is evolving with new materials, new equipment and new solutions to reduce cost and increase adoption rates.


White OLED TV - Current leading solution
White OLED TV technology with RGB color filter is in production today with LG Display being the only panel supplier. This technology still uses an evaporation process (without shadow mask) which requires many layers deposited by vacuum thermal evaporation driving higher cost for both equipment and materials. It also has higher capex costs and material cost resulting in high manufacturing cost for large size TV. White OLED self emissive TV technology delivers super performance, vivid colors, higher contrast, a true black color, energy efficiency and a thinner flexible form factor. However, it also suffers from lifetime issues especially for blue emitter, peak brightness, higher cost and lower production volume.
LG Display has been the only supplier for white OLED. It has started working on RGB IJP (ink jet printing) technology and presented a paper at Display Week 2019 with Nanosys on ELQD. LGD recently announced that it will invest an additional 3 trillion KRW into a Gen 10.5 (2,940mm x 3370mm) OLED production line, mainly producing 65-inch and above super-size TV panels. It will start producing 30K sheets/m from the first half of 2022 and an additional 15K sheets/m will be produced from the first half of 2023. LGD will use the MMG (Multi Model on a glass) method where it will combine different sizes on one mother glass to improve profitability.


RGB OLED TV - Potential future wave

RGB OLED technology has been successfully produced and used for smartphone and other smaller size displays. But it has been a great challenge to produce RGB on larger glass for TV application. Also new OLED TV technology is needed to overcome the higher cost structure of white OLED. RGB OLED has a simple device structure leading to potentially lower cost. But large-scale manufacturing is still immature and IJP and OVJP (Organic Vapor Jet Printing) technology are still developing. Short material lifetimes and device challenges may still exist for this technology butRGB OLED may be the future wave. According to Applied Material’s presentation at DisplayWeek 2019,
“RGB OLED TV can achieve LCD cost parity and mass adoption with material improvement (ink jet) and/ or equipment innovations (evaporation)”.

RGB OLED TV -  Inkjet printing (IJP) solution
Inkjet printing can have cost advantages compared to the VTE (Vacuum Thermal Evaporation) techniques currently used. According to Kateeva’s presentation at the Display Week 2019 Business Conference, the VTE process uses only 10% of source materials whereas inkjet printing uses 95% of the solution materials. Ink jet printing‘s additive manufacturing technique ensures material efficiency and allows for soft mask designs with fewer lithography and mask requirements. With more efficient use of RGB materials, and no color filter or shadow mask, IJP should be scalable to large glass sizes. It has the potential for producing higher brightness and lower cost TVs. Companies such as Kateeva can enable lower cost OLED TV production with ink jet printing for RGB pixel printing. Production of top emission OLED panels can facilitate the 8K revolution in OLED by increasing the optical performance. RGB OLED for IJP is still under development. It can provide many benefits for panel makers by reducing manufacturing cost, and enhancing OLED performance.

RGB OLED TV – Organic Vapor Jet Printing (OVJP) Solution

RGB OLED organic vapor jet printing is being developed as a mask-less, solvent-less printing technology for side-by-side RGB displays. According to Universal Display’s presentation at Display Week 2019, the emissive layers are dry printed using OVJP and there are no fine metal masks (FMM) and no solvent. Other layers can also be printed by OVJP or VTE. The OLED materials are the same as are currently used in standard VTE deposition. OVJP can be scaled to Gen 10 and beyond. Historically over-spray has been an issue with OVJP but new processes such as directed spray could eliminate or reduce these issues.

QD OLED TV - Quantum Dot Color Conversion Solution
Quantum dot (QD) technology can enable great increases in color gamut (supporting more of the BT 2020 gamut), higher brightness (4000 cd/m² and above) and purer colors by bringing LCD performance closer to OLED level. It can even exceed OLED in certain areas such as brightness. QDs are going from improving backlight of LCD to shifting to self-emissive display by eliminating backlight.  Samsung Display is building a pilot production facility for QD OLED (with QD Color Convertor), which will start production in 2019. It simplifies the panel structure and fabrication process and eliminates shadow mask patterning. However the process needs highly efficient blue OLED materials with a long lifetime. This could open up new opportunities for QD.  Blue OLED with a quantum dot color convertor layer should increase brightness efficiency, especially compared to the white OLED architecture used by LG Display. It can provide better material lifetime and lower costs due to the simpler structure. But the technology is not yet in mass production and it may still face issues in materials and Ink jet deposition.

Next Gen OLED TV – Needs new solution

OLED TV has secured a strong presence in the premium TV market because of great picture quality, design differentiation, perfect black and infinite contrast ratio. LG Electronics is the most successful brand using LG Display’s OLED TV panels. Other brands such as Sony, Panasonic, Skyworth, TPV, Hisense, Konka and others have joined in using LG Display’s panels. LGD is converting LCD TV capacity to OLED TV and accelerating its plans to develop 10.5G fab capacity. Ink jet printing (IJP) can offer lower manufacturing cost due to lower capex, lower material cost from the simple structure and color filter elimination. But the lifetime of soluble blue OLED needs improvement.

Summary

LG Display is increasing its 10.5 Gen OLED production capacity with additional investment. BOE, and CSOT are planning to bring in OLED capacity in future years. Many suppliers including Universal Display, Cynora, Kulux and others are working towards improving the efficiency, resolution, lifetime and costs of materials. Companies such as Applied Materials and Kateeva are developing new equipment for better cost and higher efficiency. LG Display is also working on RGB IJP (ink jet printing) technology and presented a paper at Displayweek 2019 with Nanosys. Samsung Display is building a pilot production facility for QD OLED (with QD Color Convertor).
New OLED TV technology solutions (RGB OLED, QD OLED,..) combined with printed manufacturing capabilities have the potential to enable lower-cost solutions and higher adoption rate. (SD)

Sweta Dash, President, Dash-Insights

Sweta Dash is the founding president of Dash-Insights, a market research and consulting company specializing in the display industry. For more information, contact sweta@dash-insights.com or visit 
www.dash-insight.com
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Renewed Interest in Rigid OLED Smartphone Displays

7/3/2019

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Rigid OLED smartphone display fab utilization rates are increasing and the technology is starting to receive renewed interest in the market. Several factors have contributed to this shift including price reductions, a lower price gap with LTPS LCD, availability of larger size display, new designs, a need for mid-range OLED products and slow sales for flexible OLED displays.
This is not a new trend. In 2018 there was also renewed interest for rigid OLED around Q3, after slow sales of iPhone X products. The interest went down again around Q4 2018. This trend may have several implications for the industry such as price pressure for LTPS especially in a declining smartphone market, pushing LTPS products more towards the low end and reducing the opportunity for future miniLED based products.


Higher Utilization Rates for Rigid OLED

DSCC reported in its June blog that rigid OLED fab utilization rates stayed at more than 80% level in March, April and May, up from 60% in February. According to DSCC, rigid OLED demand drivers included a reduced price gap with LTPS LCD, larger screen sizes for 2019 models such as the Galaxy A series, and multiple Chinese brands' aggressive pricing for new smartphone models to boost growth and increase market share.
Rigid OLED display first came to smartphones through Samsung, and was chosen because they had a thinner, lighter form factor, better viewing angles, higher contrast and faster response time than the LCDs previously used. OLED served mostly the high-end and mid-range markets with limited market share. But the demand changed with introduction of flexible OLED displays.
Flexible displays gained higher acceptance with Samsung’s Galaxy products with the new curved design (Edge design). It reached the highest level of interest with Apple’s decision’s to use flexible OLED display for the iPhone X in 2017. All other smartphone brands also wanted to emulate Apple and focused their design on flexible displays. Most of the new suppliers from China decided to focus on flexible OLED production. Market interest shifted from rigid to flexible and demand also shifted.
After lower than expected sales of the iPhone X especially in early 2018, the industry’s interest shifted to rigid OLED displays.  By the end of 2018 Q4 demand and fab utilization rates went down again. According to DSCC information in June 2019, “flexible OLED fab utilization continues to lag, but we expect a modest uptick in June to 42% utilization rates after four months in the 30s”. Similar trends of renewed interest in rigid OLED have been seen again in 2019 after weaker demand for Apple iPhones. According to some industry news sources, the supply of rigid OLED panels for smartphones are getting a little tight due to the integration of in-display fingerprint sensors.
Slow Sales for Flexible OLED display
Samsung’s Q1 2019 result showed a quarterly loss in the display panel business due to decreased demand for flexible displays and increasing market supplies of large displays. The company planned to focus on improved earnings by boosting sales of rigid OLEDs and offering differentiated products featuring new technology such as Infinity Display and fingerprint-on-display. In a slow smartphone market, higher priced products with flexible OLED displays are facing demand challenges. Samsung as well as many China brands are looking at rigid OLED displays to meet lower price point midrange market demand.



Reduced Price gap with LTPS LCD

Rigid OLED display cost has the potential to come closer to LTPS LCD’s cost level, especially for Samsung Display. But new suppliers will face cost challenges. The possibility of a lower price gap with LTPS LCD combined with the advantages of OLED is bringing renewed interest in rigid OLEDs. According to industry estimates, the price gaps with LTPS LCD are expected to decline to $4 to $6 in 2019, down from $9 to $10 in 2018.
Samsung Display has increased its utilization rates in recent months bringing in higher production volume. Samsung Display is the largest supplier of rigid OLED displays with a majority share of the market and Samsung Galaxy products are the biggest consumer of rigid OLEDs. Suppliers from China such as Tianma, EDO, and Visionox are starting to increase production.
Still, there exist many challenges such as: not enough suppliers are focusing on rigid OLED and most of the new planned capacities from China are for flexible displays. There is very little design differentiation between LTPS LCD and rigid OLED smartphones due to 18:9 full active bezel-less screen designs.



New designs and features for Rigid OLED

LTPS LCD is facing price pressure due to slower demand and rigid OLED price reductions, but makers are still pushing the technology to add new features and capabilities. Suppliers are working on full screen in-cell fingerprint LTPS LCDs as well as hole in-cell touch capability to compete with OLED in the smartphone market. Rigid OLED is also using in-display finger print sensors for premium models. Flexible OLED is shifting to blind hole and hole through architectures. Chinese brands are planning to adopt blind hole or hole through designs using LTPS LCDs. Apple is adopting COF (Chip on Film) for LTPS LCD and flexible OLED. Chinese brands are adopting COF for both LTPS LCD and rigid OLED.

Reducing opportunity for future miniLED based products 


​MiniLED backlight options are coming to LTPS LCD, offering higher contrast (by using local area dimming), faster response times, and reducing the performance gap with OLED. That is why suppliers such as AUO, BOE, Tianma and many others showcased prototypes of miniLED-based products at Display Week 2019. In spite of display performance advantages, miniLED based products still face cost challenges to make them competitive in the smartphone market. In the near term, suppliers are focusing more on value-based applications such as gaming monitors, automotive and VR. LTPS LCD with miniLED backlight’s price points need to be between rigid OLED and regular LTPS LCD to be competitive. The reduced price gap with rigid OLED in 2019 is reducing the opportunity for a miniLED entrance in smartphones this year. If costs can be reduced in the future, the technology may offer strong competition to rigid OLED in the next few years.



Slower smart Phone market needs mid range products

According to IDC’s press release in May 2019,  “global smartphone shipments will face another challenging year in 2019 with volume forecasted to decline 1.9% from 2018. This will mark the third consecutive year of market contraction driven by highly saturated markets in developed countries and slower churn in some developing economies”. IDC also reported, “In all markets, pricing remains a critical decision factor when purchasing a new handset, and this is creating new opportunities for mid range price points”. Samsung and other Chinese brands have been introducing models with mid-range price points and rigid OLED panels meeting those price point requirements. LTPS LCD is mostly focusing on mid-range and lower end products. With more price pressure LTPS may have to compete with a-Si LCD at the low end.
Lower prices, lower price gaps with LTPS, larger sizes, new designs, and meeting mid-range price requirements will bring new opportunities for rigid OLED. But challenges such as tight supply, not enough fab capacity, very little design differentiation with LTPS LCD, and the future entrance of miniLED backlight may lead to limited demand for rigid OLED in future years.

Sweta Dash, President, Dash-Insights
Sweta Dash is the founding president of Dash-Insights, a market research and consulting company specializing in the display industry. For more information, contact sweta@dash-insights.com or visit www.dash-insight.com
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    Sweta Dash, Founder/President, Dash-Insights

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