LG Display may have made a major step forward in the creation of panels. The South Korean company seems to have succeeded in developing a new OLED panel based on a blue phosphorescent emitter. This new type of emitter, supplied by Universal Display, offers an internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of 100%, compared to 25% for fluorescent emitters currently used. This would translate into energy savings of around 20-30% for the display itself, depending on the content displayed.
The conditional is a must, since the report from Korea is not confirmed, but the source seems credible. After all, Universal Display has been working on the development of blue emitters for many years, even if it had recently stated that it would take a few more months before they were ready. The main challenge was to increase the lifespan of the materials. LG Display, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a tandem design to make the display commercially viable, perhaps even sooner than expected by UDC.
The tandem architecture uses two OLED structures stacked on top of each other, achieving the same brightness as a single-layer OLED with lower current. This results in a longer lifespan for OLED materials and higher efficiency. LG Display has been commercializing tandem displays since 2019 for the automotive market, which has strict requirements for lifespan. The company has recently adopted tandem displays for tablets, most notably Apple’s iPad Pro, and was the first to market a tandem display for laptops. Now, it is reportedly using the same architecture to enable the adoption of blue phosphorescence.
According to the report, LG Display plans to finalize development soon and consider commercializing such a display “within a year.” This could mean LGD will be the first to commercialize blue-phosphorescent OLEDs, giving it a competitive edge over direct competitors like Samsung Display. These displays could consume 30 to 50 percent less power than standard OLEDs. However, they will be more expensive to produce due to the more complex process, the need for twice the amount of OLED frontplane materials (the frontplane is one of the parts of a display, i.e. the layer that produces the image we see), and the likely higher price of UDC’s blue emitters compared to red and green materials.
It is not entirely clear whether LGD is adopting an architecture where one layer of the tandem stack uses a blue phosphorescent material and the other uses a blue fluorescent emitter. If used wisely, this design could be very interesting.
#LGs #tandem #OLEDs #consume #power #traditional #OLEDs