In January 2023, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in South Korea designated display technology as a national strategic technology, following the footsteps of semiconductors, secondary batteries, and biotechnology. This significant move has opened the doors for expanded tax benefits for major players such as Samsung Display, LG Display, and various Korean materials, parts, and equipment manufacturers. This was at the tail end of a seven-year South Korean government investment project in OLED manufacturing dating back to 2018. The sum in 2018 was $468 million dollars; the sum of investment in display technologies that go around is $47.5 billion.
Into this perfect storm of ambition steps Apple with demands for new display technologies to meet its need for a truly groundbreaking mixed reality (MR) headset. For the display, the rumors have been that Apple pushed its suppliers to go to 4,000 PPI from 3,500 PPI, which was already a significant improvement on existing devices.
No doubt, Apple can see that its headset has to be significantly higher in quality than anything else that has reached the market so far, a tenet of its brand, and it looks like its suppliers have a clear path to delivering the technology and production capabilities to meet the company’s stringent specifications. This may be where Apple truly lives up to the hype about its headset being a game changer.
None of this negates any skepticism you may have, as I do, about the application and use of Apple’s headset; but in rethinking my biases, I wondered about the real bellwether audience for the product, the army of AR/VR influencers who dominate social media. Surely, they will be very impressed by a 4,000 PPI display that raises the experience far beyond what is commonly available today. Surely, they will see it as a big leap in the development of the market, and that may be enough to drag all other commentators along for the ride.
Industry insiders predict that the Korean display industry’s exports will grow from $21.1 billion in 2022 to $21.5 billion in 2023 as a result of the Korean government’s incentives, and Apple is unlikely to contribute much in terms of volumes this year. However, both Apple and the Korean government are driving investment by local companies in sixth- and eighth-generation OLEDs, MicroLED, and OLED displays to dominate the AR/VR device market.
Samsung Display is preparing to produce MicroOLED prototypes at the A2 Line in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, Korea. Meanwhile, LG Display has recently achieved a breakthrough by realizing a 3,500 pixels per inch (PPI) resolution in a 0.42-inch OLEDoS (micro OLED).
The rumors are that Apple has already pushed its suppliers to go to 4,000 PPI from 3,500 PPI, which was a significant improvement on existing devices, and if successful, it can accelerate the move to higher PPIs, where Oledon’s claims would make a future generation of Apple’s headset unassailable while giving its coterie of Korean suppliers a big bump in manufacturing capability.
No doubt, Apple can see that its headset has to be significantly higher in quality than anything else that has reached the market so far, a tenet of its brand, and it looks like its suppliers have a clear path to delivering the technology and production capabilities to meet the company’s stringent specifications. This may be where Apple truly lives up to the hype about its headset being a game changer.
None of this negates any skepticism you may have, as I do, about the application and use of Apple’s headset, but in rethinking my biases, I wondered about the real bellwether audience for the product, the army of AR/VR influencers who dominate social media. Surely, they will be very impressed by a 4,000 PPI display that raises the experience far beyond what is commonly available today. Surely, they will see it as a big leap in the development of the market, and that may be enough to drag all other commentators along for the ride.
Korea’s Display Manufacturing—An Inside Game
This is all coming as a flurry of expectations has been building for the last six months. APS Holdings, a South Korean company specializing in fine metal masks (FMM) for ultra-high resolution OLED on silicon (OLEDoS), announced in December 2022, the development of an OLEDoS with a resolution of 3,000 PPI. At the time, the company said it was working towards increasing the resolution to 4,000 PPI as part of a government-backed project aiming to develop a prototype of a 4,000 PPI AR/VR glass by 2024. Now, it seems as if the company is helping Samsung deliver 4,000 PPI near-for Apple.
APS Holdings and Oledon have had a long-standing research collaboration. The two companies began working together in 2020 on FMM pixel patterning for various OLED displays. APS Holdings’ high-resolution FMM, combined with Oledon’s plane source evaporator, has the potential to pattern pixel sizes of 5 µm, meeting the increasing expectations for density in OLEDos designs. As a startup, Oledon benefited from the Korean government’s initial surge of investment in the display industry and is now seeing its technology take its place on the production lines, connecting the dots on solving the manufacturing issues for Apple’s display. It’s not like these companies were not working together in the past, but when the world’s biggest company comes knocking on your door, it is amazing how motivated manufacturers become in moving cutting-edge production tools to the front of the line. Would all of this innovation have happened without Apple? It was already there, but it would be struggling to find mainstream adoption, maybe it would be a few years away, but now, thanks to Apple, it’s there, now, ready for heaven and earth to be moved.
It has to be said, an American company, eMagin, has been pivotal in creating this opportunity for Korea’s manufacturers. It revealed the world’s first directly patterned full-color OLED microdisplay with >2600 ppi in 2016.
Traditional OLEDs in TVs use white or blue OLEDs with color filters to achieve a full-color image, while smartphone OLEDs utilize RGB sub-pixels for each color. Microdisplays for AR/VR require high pixel densities. So, in the long term, the industry was going to be shifting to RGB OLEDoS, which can provide better color quality and increased product lifespan. Samsung Display is also planning to develop RGB OLEDoS, even though they were not initially active in the OLEDoS technology space.
eMagin has its sights set on the AR/VR market and is working towards developing denser pixel structures than current technology allows with a view to potentially increase the lifespan of these products by two or three fold. It’s a sign of how quickly alignments are being found in the industry on what is, to some extent, an esoteric and niche product, to accelerate volume manufacturing capabilities. It would not be happening without Apple. Would eMagin even get a look in if Samsung had the time to develop its own RGB OLEDoS to the extent that it needed?
As the display technology sector becomes increasingly interconnected and reliant on collaboration, the partnerships between Korean companies connected to Apple’s headset manufacturing, with the limitless assistance of the Korean government, are converging on a point of dominance. These alliances have the potential to drive innovation and reshape the future of the display industry. That doesn’t hinder the research and development of technologies in other parts of the world, but when it comes to manufacturing, Apple may have just accelerated Korea’s already powerful hold on the market to a monopolistic level.
As an aside, I am going to keep my eye on Oledon. This Korean startup may be the pivotal company, maybe the main catalyst, in the volume manufacturing of Apple’s headset display. If the company can hold on to its claim of delivering technology that could potentially achieve pixel densities of up to 10,000 PPI, its production equipment could play a significant role in the development of next generation headsets and get us there faster.
While there are many challenges in the manufacturing of a 10,000 PPI, Oledon claims to have addressed the issues of mask alignment and the precision required of material deposition with its processes. Despite all of the possibilities, RGB OLEDos devices, and the promise of OLEDs using metasurfaces, the crux of getting good yields for higher resolution headsets will rely on what Oledon does best.
| PPI | Resolution impact | Visual quality | Technical measures |
| 3,500 | Higher than current mainstream AR/VR/XR devices | Significantly improved visual experience | – Reduced screen-door effect (SDE) – Improved text readability – Enhanced details and image sharpness |
| 4,000 | Further increase in resolution compared to 3,500 PPI | Even better visual experience | – Further reduced SDE – Greater text readability – Higher level of details and image sharpness |
| 10,000 | Substantially higher than any existing AR/VR/XR device | Unprecedented visual experience | – Virtually eliminated SDE – Extremely high text readability – Exceptional level of details and image sharpness |
Having said all of that, and if you have read so far, back in 2020, it was rumored that Sony was going to build the display for Apple’s rumored AR/VR headset. What happened to turning rumor into a very likely scenario? Who knows. One thing is clear, the US needs to learn a few things from South Korea about investing in its technology infrastructure. The speed at which Apple’s headset is finally coming together now would not have been possible in the US or Europe where the interconnectedness of firms and assistance from the government are woeful, by comparison.
Reference
Kim, C., Kim, K., Kwon, O., Jung, J., Park, J.K., Kim, D.H. and Jung, K. (2020), 61-1: FMM Pixel Patterning for Various OLED Displays. SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers, 51: 905-908. https://doi.org/10.1002/sdtp.14017
