Applied Materials, the company that supplies LG Display, Samsung Display and other OLED display makers with manufacturing equipment, has announced a new, maskless technology known as “MAX OLED”. The new tech is said to pave the way for those companies to make “superior OLED displays” in high-end smartphones, tablets, PCs and televisions.
According to the company, MAX OLED will make it easier for display makers to scale OLED manufacturing from Gen 6 glass substrates to Gen 8 substrates, which are about two-times bigger, and ultimately go beyond that.
Although the company did not provide much detail about the new pixel structure or its new deposition technology, OLED-INFO explained that the technology deposits and encapsulates each pixel individually, using a specially designed maskless process.
Because of this, the MAX OLED tech is said to be able to boost OLED display brightness by up to three-times, while increasing the resolution by around 2.5-times, the company said. The new displays will have a pixel density of around 2,000 pixels per inch.
In addition, another benefit will be reduced power consumption, with energy usage set to drop by more than 30% in the new OLED panels. That will help increase their lifetime by 5-times that of existing OLED displays, the company added.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of the new tech is that it gives display makers the ability to produce OLED panels of any shape and size from a single factory – which hasn’t been possible before.
Applied Materials said Samsung Display, Japan Display and Visionox will be the first companies to use the new equipment, but doing so will require them to make a steep investment of $500 million or more, according to the analyst firm DSCC.
Applied Materials group vice president and general manager of Display and Flexible Technology, Brian Shieh, said the MAX OLED technology is a significant breakthrough that will make it possible to scale OLED to hundreds of millions of tablets, PCs and TVs.
"We are proud to be partnering with Samsung Display to help bring this revolutionary technology to the global marketplace,” he added.
However, despite name-checking Samsung Display, DSCC reports that it may well be Japan Display and Visionox, a Chinese display maker, that are the first to install the MAX OLED technology. It notes that these companies have been working on separate initiatives, called “eLEAP” and “ViP” respectively, that utilise Applied Materials’ new tech.
However, Ross Young, co-founder and CEO of DSCC, said Samsung Display’s interest in the new tech suggests it could have an enormous impact on the industry.
“Samsung Display has the financial muscle to expand capacity faster than its competitors and achieve the full potential of MAX OLED technology, scaling it from 1” for AR/VR to any OLED TV size in a single fab if it chooses to do so," Young said.
