With Midsized OLED TVs Still Years Off, Samsung Says Flexible AMOLEDs Will Come After

SAN FRANCISCO -- Samsung is less sure when long-anticipated large OLED TV sets are coming than it is about what will follow, a representative said Tuesday. “Don’t ask me when” OLED TV will arrive commercially, said Ho Kyoon Chung, adviser to Samsung Mobile Display. Asked when Samsung will sell OLEDs with plastic substrates, he replied after delivering a keynote at the OLEDs World Summit: “My favorite word is ‘coming soon.'” But Chung expressed confidence that he knows “the next big thing” after OLED TV: flexible AMOLED technology for bendable, unbreakable displays. AMOLED is short for active matrix organic light-emitting diode.

Even moderate-size OLED TVs won’t be commercialized until 2013, an LG representative said at the conference. That’s when a 31-inch 3D set that LG showed at IFA in Berlin, and perhaps the first other sets larger than 15 inches, are tentatively scheduled to be out, said Jueng-Gil Lee, a research fellow at LG Display. OLED sets will be in the “premium market” then, their costs having dropped to triple those of LCD competitors from 10 times, he said. The newer technology will go mainstream in 2017, when OLED will have gained a cost advantage, he said. The first sets larger than 50 inches should arrive in 2015, Lee said. Asked about prices, he said, “I'm not the right person to answer that.”

Samsung has made important advances in flexible AMOLED technology, said Samsung’s Chung. But he withheld important details on the progress as proprietary and was vague on timing. Chung did offer a presentation slide of Displaybank projections that the flexible AMOLED will quickly build in the second half of the decade to $30 billion in 2020. With unspecified collaborators, Samsung “found a solution” for plastic substrates that “believe it or not … can go over 400 degrees centigrade,” he said. It uses a multilayer inorganic barrier and provides thermal stability to compete with metal foil substrates and improve thin-film transistor (TFT) performance, a point on which there can be “no compromise,” Chung said.

And Samsung has developed an Atomic Layer Deposition/Molecular Layer Deposition (ALD/MLD) coating that offers high throughput, scaling and “excellent uniformity,” Chung said. He said he was showing how it works for the first time publicly. “This is a new approach -- innovation” in relation to the only known alternative process for thin-film encapsulation, Vitex’s Barix coating, which Chung said has high equipment costs and “not ideal” film quality. Samsung’s technology “is very early stage” but is the way the industry will go, he said.