A widely reported article from ETNews has reported that Samsung is building a pilot G8 production line for QDOLED displays, that is to say, displays that generate blue light that is converted to red and green by quantum dots, rather than using White OLED and then filtering, as current LG OLED panels do.
The report suggests that Canon Tokki is supplying vapour deposition equipment for the blue layer, while Kateeva is supplying equipment to print the QD conversion structure.
Analyst Comment
Separately, ETNews reports that Samsung Display is building a production line (Asan Tangjung A3) that will focus on making foldable displays. The capacity is likely to be around 100,000 displays per month, with planned production of around one million units in 2019. The blog also said that Samsung Display is now supplying its Y-Octa technology integrated touch technology to Oppo for use in smartphones. (So What is Y-OCTA?
That Samsung is moving to develop some pilot production is not really suprising as the company has previously acknowledged that it is researching this approach and even if it doesn’t go into high volume production, the firm would acquire a lot of knowledge that could be useful if it moves to electrically-stimulated QD technology at a later date. Even in the shorter term, building filter-like structures for QD conversion is useful if Samsung moves to an LCD + QD filter architecture.
Blue remains the weak area of OLEDs, but Samsung is, of course, close to UDC and has investments in Kyulux and Cynora which are both promising breakthrough levels of improvement in efficiency.
The key is making the blue light using OLEDs, LEDs (via an LCD) or even using microLEDs. (BR)
