Samsung has acknowledged that it is continuing to look at the possibility of using OLED substrates and materials to drive an architecture that exploits the work that it is doing to develop ‘QD Filter’ technology for its LCD business. This would be a very logical approach, although it probably depends on better blue materials than are currently available. The architecture avoids the challenges of moving polarisers into the LCD cell and should have much better efficacy than LG’s white OLED-based approach. DSCC believes that Samsung will initially use fluorescent materials and need two blue layers.
The QD OLED Stack as expected uses 13 layers compared to 22 for LG.
DSCC has included an amount for Samsung’s production in its forecasts for OLED materials, although there are a lot of potential risks to the forecast. Now a report, quoted by the OLED-Info (but without a link and we couldn’t track it down!) suggests that Samsung Display may invest as much as $8.8 billion iby 2022 in the capacity. DSCC has forecast that if the pilot production of QD-OLED goes well in 2019 (at 5K per month 8.5G substrates), it could scale to add an additional 5K substrates in 2020 and as many as 30K in 2021 and 2022.
If the project is successful, the value of OLED TV could overtake the value of the mobile market by 2020. The chart below is an update to the one we published in June.
There are a lot of unknowns in this forecast in TV towards the end of the period. Image:DSCC
