LG Display unveiled a 5" plastic-based bendable flexible AMOLED panel at SID 2013. LG did not release any technical details, but as far as we know this panel uses polyimide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use an WRGB technology - white OLEDs with color filters).

LG Display is currently using their 4.5-Gen OLED fab in Paju to work on these flexible displays, which won't provide them with a a lot of capacity, but the company did reiterated their plans to release a mobile phone with such a display by the end of 2013.

LG wasn't the only company to show flexible OLEDs at SID. Toshiba unveiled a 10.2" 223 PPI WRGB panel, Panasonic showed a 4" 224x224 flexible direct-emission panel and Finally, Arizona State Universities' Flexible Display Center demonstrated a 14.7" flexible OLED (960x720, 81 PPI). All of those panels use Oxide-TFT backplanes.

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OSD Displays told us that they expect to release three new new AMOLED panels by Q1 2014. Since CMEL stopped their AMOLED production in 2009, it's been very difficult to buy AMOLED displays for low-volume products. The only AMOLED suppliers (Samsung, Sony and LGD) do not offer their panels for these kinds of projects (they only target in-house products and mass-volume ones such as mobile phones or digital cameras).

We do not know who'll be producing those displays, but possible candidates include Innolux, Visionox, AU Optronics and RiTDisplay. If OSD will indeed be able to deliver on their promise, it's going to be great news for all those seeking AMOLED displays for their products.

Japan Display announced that they decided to built a pilot OLED display manufacturing line in its Ishikawa Plant. The company will start to setup the manufacturing equipment towards the end of 2013, and small-scale mass production will begin in the spring of 2014. This new pilot line will be a 4.5-Gen fab (730x920 mm) with a capacity of 4,000 substrates a month. While this is good news to hear JDI commit to an OLED line, it means that we shouldn't expect real AMOLED mass production from them till at least 2015.

Last month JDI unveiled a new 5.2" Full-HD (423 ppi) OLED panel, using an WRGB structure and an LTPS backplane.

A few weeks ago we reported about Merck's new Taiwanese technology development center that is focused on OLEDs. Merck held an official inauguration ceremony, during which they revealed that LG's 55" OLED TV, now on sale in Korea for $10,000, is using Merck's materials.

Merck also says that they are collaborating with Taiwanese panel makers (probably AU Optronics and Innolux) on developing ink-jet printing of OLED TV panels. Merck is providing the local companies with soluble OLED materials.

The Google Glass HMDs currently use LCoS panels, but reports from Korea suggest that for the consumer edition, Google will use OLED microdisplays, made by Samsung. At SID 2013, SDC's CEO did mention OLED microdisplays on silicon during his keynote speech. He also says that these kinds of displays may be used for augmented-reality devices such as Google Glass. Last month Google's CEO Larry Page visited Samsung's OLED facilities, and apparently Page is "interested in Samsung's OLED business". So now the rumors are that Google are interested in small sized OLED displays.

While Samsung is not producing OLED microdisplays, the company did research the technology. You can read about Samsung's 2011 conference paper detailing a 0.6" XGA OLED microdisplay here.

Ignis Innovation announced that samples of its 20" 1296x768 (XGA) AMOLED display will be available in August 2013. Ignis will offer these samples to display makers for evaluation of Ignis' MaxLife compensation technology in their own displays (more on this below). They will sell the display for low volume, demanding applications such as medical imaging and scientific imaging.

The 20" AMOLED panels use a-Si backplane and are made by RiTdisplay. The panels are only 1.3mm thick (the complete display module is 3 mm thick). The refresh rate is 240Hz. The MaxLife external compensation technology continuously measures every pixel in the display and compensates for even the smallest shift in performance (due to burn-in or bad manufacturing issues), making it completely uniform and completely stable. Read my SID-2012 report on Ignis for more information on their technology.

Panasonic announced the world's most efficient OLED panel (1x1 cm) at 114 lm/W. The company also unveiled a larger panel (25 cm²) with 110 lm/W. The thin (less than 2 mm) panels feature long lifetime - over 100,000 hours (LT50) and a brightness of of 1,000 cd/m².

To achieve this high efficiency, Panasonic focused on an all-phosphorescent design (with an optimal stacked layer design) and new light extraction technology (Built-up Light Extraction Substrate, or BLES). While this may be the world's most efficient panel, it's not the most efficient OLED device ever made. In 2011, Panasonic Electric Works announced that they developed a device with 128 lm/W efficiency. And In March 2013 NEC Lighting announced that they developed a device that has an efficiency of 156 lm/W. NEC's device is the world's most efficient OLED to date.