Display technology: The OLED wave and other exciting trends

Latest update time：2021-08-31 00:49

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Applied Vision | As DIC FORUM is about to open, we bring you the latest blog post by Max McDaniel, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of the Display and Flexible Technology Division of Applied Materials. The most cutting-edge development trends in display technology that you want to know are all in this article.

Since tablet computers adopted LCD technology in the early 1990s, the modern display industry has flourished. Now, we are at the beginning of another display technology revolution, with the emerging OLED display technology gradually replacing LCD in the consumer terminal field. Other technologies worth further study have also emerged, including mini LED, micro LED and micro OLED.

OLED Wave

OLED has high contrast, wide color gamut, excellent picture quality, and good flexibility and foldability. Today, OLED is widely used in the smartphone industry. In the future, the application of OLED in large-size devices such as laptops, tablets and monitors will continue to grow.

This "OLED wave" is changing the display industry. Today, all new smartphone panel production lines are OLED, and panel manufacturers will soon invest in large-size OLED production lines. This is a good opportunity for companies such as Applied Materials, because from the perspective of factory equipment investment, the scale of investment required for OLED production lines is much higher than that of LCD production lines.

We believe that OLED will dominate the market in the next decade and drive the entire display industry.

The wave of technological innovation in the display industry

Mini LED

Mini LED is an upgraded version of LCD technology and is an effort by LCD panel manufacturers to narrow the performance gap between LCD and OLED.

Mini LED technology is to install a very small LED array on the LCD backlight panel to better control the pixel lighting. Compared with traditional LCD, Mini LED backlight uses multi-zone local dimming to provide better light-dark contrast, which to some extent narrows the performance gap in contrast with OLED panels.

Mini LED LCD is to add very small LEDs to the back of the LCD panel to form an array to provide light for the pixels.

The biggest challenge facing mini LED technology is how to balance costs and benefits.

In order to achieve a high contrast ratio close to that of OLED, the mini LED LCD screen needs to add more than 10,000 chips and active matrix backplanes in addition to the original main backplane that drives the LCD pixels to achieve excellent backlight performance.

Mini LED LCDs have better display quality than traditional LCDs, but they are still not as good as OLEDs, and currently cost almost the same as OLEDs.

Micro LED

Micro-LED is a self-luminous display technology. The LEDs used in Micro-LED are less than 50-100 microns in size, and each LED is an independent red, green and blue sub-pixel.

Micro LED is a self-luminous display technology that uses LEDs less than 100 microns in size directly behind each pixel.

Micro LED technology can match or even surpass OLED and LCD in all performance aspects. It has the advantages of OLED's high image quality and thinness, and is durable. Its brightness is higher than LCD and OLED, but the energy consumption is very low. Micro LED is indeed the "ultimate dream" of display technology.

But micro-LEDs have an interrelated drawback - manufacturability and cost. The "pick and place" step is an example of a huge challenge in the production process. There are many "pick and place" technologies in development today, but none of them can meet the productivity and yield requirements of mainstream display consumer products.

Then there is the cost issue. Due to the high production difficulty and the high cost of tens of millions of LED chips themselves, micro LEDs are too expensive for mainstream applications.

Due to cost and manufacturing difficulties, we believe that the application of Micro LED will be limited to augmented reality, wearable devices and very high-end public information displays for at least the next few years. However, as the technology continues to innovate and improve, Micro LED technology may rival OLED in mainstream consumer products after 2030.

Micro OLED

Micro OLED is another emerging technology in the panel industry. Micro OLED has extremely high resolution and can be used in near-eye display devices.

The front panel used by Micro OLED is very similar to that of white OLED TV panels. However, in order to achieve high resolution and tiny pixels, the back panel uses a silicon wafer based on semiconductor technology.

The front panel used by Micro OLED is very similar to the front panel of current white light OLED TV panels; in order to achieve high resolution and small pixels, the back panel material is silicon wafer

Micro OLED is a feasible technology in terms of process and cost, but its application will be limited to small near-eye or projection display fields. We believe that it will not be able to shake the general trend of conventional OLED application in mainstream products.

Conclusion

The next wave of technological change brought by OLED is quietly approaching, which will drive a new round of plant construction investment in the next decade. For Applied Materials, all technological innovations are good opportunities for corporate development.

The equipment investment scale of OLED production line is about twice that of traditional LCD, which will greatly expand our business opportunities in backplane and frontplane.
Mini LED requires the addition of a backlight backplane, which increases the processing steps of the equipment.
Micro LEDs require more innovation in chip manufacturing and high-end backplanes, which will create excellent opportunities for us in the display and semiconductor fields of front panels.
Micro OLEDs will also provide opportunities for Applied Materials' display and chip technologies.

We believe that the display industry has a bright future in the next decade, and there will be more disruptive new technologies in the future. We will work with customers, peers and partners to create a more dynamic and stunning visual experience for consumers.

※This article is excerpted from an Applied Materials blog post. For the full content, please click "Read Original" to view it.

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About Applied Materials

Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMAT) is a leader in materials engineering solutions that are behind nearly every new chip and advanced display produced worldwide. With technologies that can transform materials at the atomic level at scale, we enable our customers to realize what’s possible. At Applied Materials, we believe that our innovations enable a better future. For more information, please visit:

www.appliedmaterials.com .