Production to Scale Up

OLED TVs to Bow At Long Last In 30- to 40-Inch Sizes By 2013, SID Told

May 26, 2010 by Mark Seavy|Top News

SEATTLE -- Long described as awaiting their debut just over the horizon, OLED TVs at long last will arrive in 30- to 40-inch screen sizes by 2013 as manufacturers scale up production and resolve product life expectancy and production issues, industry executives said at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference.

But the sales at the start will be small, about 1 million units and $600 million in revenue in 2013, said Paul Gagnon, DisplaySearch director of North American TV research. Much will depend on how extensively OLED manufacturers will move to larger substrates. Samsung, which over the years has promised OLED TVs up to 40 inches, will install 5.5-generation equipment allowing it to produce 42-inch panels, executives said. AU Optronics, which halted AMOLED manufacturing in 2006, is resuming production in Q1 2011, AU Senior Manager Ching Sang Chuang said. It will start with 3.5-generation substrates for 2-3-inch cellphone displays, but eventually will move to 32-inch and up panels for TVs, he said. AU created separate development teams for TVs and cellphones, he said.

"I do believe that manufacturers, besides the backplane issues, are able to scale up this process and I think you will see large-size OLED TVs,” Universal Display Chief Financial Officer Sidney Rosenblatt said. “The question is when.” Samsung is Universal’s largest customer for its phosphorescent OLED materials. Sony was the only company to actually market an OLED TV, bringing out an 11-inch model that had limited sales before being discontinued. LG Electronics is expected to field a 15-inch set later this year.

Part of the push to larger OLED TVs is being led by DuPont, which developed a solutions process for making panels that combine coating and printing. It’s working with Dai Nippon, which developed a special printer that was able to produce a 50-inch OLED panel prototype in just under two minutes using a solutions process based on DuPont materials. DuPont and Dai Nippon have installed a prototype 4G line at a DuPont plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., said William Feehery, global business director for OLEDs at DuPont. The coating and printing method has proved more successful in producing larger sizes than the vacuum evaporation process that has been used to produce OLEDs to date, he said.

Part of the problem in evaporation manufacturing is the increase in deflection that occurs as the panels get larger, makers say. In the case of 3G OLED glass, the deflection is 1-3mm, they say. But with 4G that increases to 34mm, making it difficult to align the keys marks in the 4G substrate, they say. “If you want to go to a larger generation, it’s not so easy to fabricate by using evaporation process,” Chuang said. “For larger than Gen 6, I believe the solutions process will be a promising one."

The projected lifetime of OLED panels has long been an issue in migrating the technology to large-screen TVs, executives said. But DuPont has achieved lifetimes of 29,000 hours for red, 110,000 for green and 34,000 for blue materials, at 50 percent of initial brightness, bring them into TV levels, Feehery said. Universal also recently boosted the brightness of its light blue phosphorsecent material to 9,000 hours from 5,000 hours last fall, the company said. “People report the materials lifetimes but they don’t report it after they have gone through the manufacturing process,” Freeley said. “The real question is after I do the whole thing and I make a TV, how long is it going to last? There is a big difference between that and a lab. There are differences in how you run a TV and how hot it gets."

SID Conference Notebook

Fresh from investing $2.2 billion in 5.5-generation OLED production, Samsung Mobile Display (SMD) will add an 8G line to produce 46- and 55-inch panels, SMD Chief Technology Officer Sang Soo Kim said during a keynote Tuesday at SID. Timing for installing the 8G line, when it will start production and what the cost will be haven’t been set, a Samsung spokesman said. The introduction of 40-inch and up AMOLEDs will be key to helping staunch a decline in TV sales to 142 million units in 2014 from 158 million the previous year, Kim said. AMOLED TVs will be the next growth driver because it can produce many key inherent benefits over LCDs, including better power consumption and switching speeds measured in milliseconds versus microseconds, Kim said. OLED TVs also will be well suited for 3D because they can be driven in a frame-by-frame sequential mode against the line-by-line progressive driving used by LCDs, he said. The life of AMOLED panels is expected to double to 100,000 hours within five years, while power consumption of 40-inch panels declines to 30 watts from 62 watts, Kim said. OLED displays also will be able to do local dimming on every pixel, he said. OLED TV panels also will shift to low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) oxide backplanes from standard LTPS and move to thin-film encapsulation from glass, Kim said. Kim declined to disclose the capacity for Samsung’s 8G facility, but said it will be on par with the company’s LCD plants. The 5.5G facility will have monthly capacity for 70,000 glass substrates when it starts production in 2012, Kim said. Among the products planned for the 5.5G factory will be tablet PC displays, Kim said. The mobile OLED display market is expected to grow to 600 million units by 2015, up from 45 million units this year, Kim said.

Syndiant will sample a 0.37-inch LCoS microdisplay chip late this year with 720p resolution and hopes to migrate it to 1080p in 2012, Chief Technology Officer Karl Guttag said. The LCoS chip, which was scheduled to ship by mid-year (CED June 18 p4), will likely have a 7 mm height, he said. Syndiant also will develop a 1,366x768 version of the 0.37-inch display, he said. The brightness of the 0.37-inch 720p display will be more than 15 lumens, he said. The display will likely have 6.1-micron pixels, he said. Hana Microdisplay makes Syndiant’s LCoS chips in Taiwan using an eight-inch wafer, the company said. Syndiant also is working with Hong Kong’s Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) on a 32x21x6mm engine for its .37-inch LCoS display, Guttag said. Among the companies ASTRI works with is Foryou Multimedia, which demonstrated a pico-projector at CES using a Syndiant LCoS chip with 1,024x600 resolution. Syndiant’s 0.21-inch chip with 800x600 resolution is at the heart of AAXA’s pico-projector that launched earlier this year at $599. Syndiant also has shown its 0.37-inch display paired with Shanghai Sanxin Technoloigy Development Co.’s light engine in a 39x24x7.8mm package.

Vizio late this year will ship LCD TVs capable of a 21:9 aspect ratio, but pricing hasn’t been set, Vice President Kenneth Lowe said. The sets will be sold as part of Vizio’s XVT Pro Series that includes a 58-inch LED-backlit LCD TV that allows for full-screen viewing of 2.35:1 films with 2,560x1,080 resolution. The TVs will have 120 Hz panels and include built-in WirelessHD and Vizio Internet Apps.

DivX remains on track to bow its DivX TV streaming video service later this year, Hans Baumgartner, group product manager for video technologies, told us. Baumgartner wouldn’t be more specific, but said that the introduction of Google TV won’t affect DivX’s plans for the 70-channel service. “It’s another competitor and it will be another change going forward,” Baumgartner said. “We are offering a different type of platform across our gamut of partners that will operate on well below an Atom processing device.” The Google TV platform is based on Intel’s Atom processor. LG Electronics is expected to add DivX TV to its Internet-capable NetCast LCD TVs through a firmware upgrade to the sets’ Broadcom processor. DivX TV will replace the company’s Connected Platform, which was designed to tie together the PC and TV. DivX got a jump in streaming video with the acquisition of AnySource last August.