At CES, Sony gained a lot of attention by displaying prototypes of several 11" and one 27" OLED-TVs. Now, Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co. (TMD) has developed a 20.8" prototype OLED-TV, which it is currently showing at the 3rd International FPD Expo (Display 2007) at Tokyo Big Sight. Sony would not say when it would commercialize OLED-TVs, but according to a report in Reuters, TMD is now saying it will begin production in 2009, with product available in Japan by the end of 2009. As far as we know, this is the first official stake in the ground to commit to making OLED-TVs.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

The benefits of OLED technology have been well documented in Display Daily. They are super thin, offer very low dark states and high contrast, are fast enough to avoid any motion artifacts, offer wide viewing angles and should cut power consumption in the long term. Of concern has been the lifetime of the OLED materials, particularly in the blue. This has so far limited the use of OLEDs to products that have short lifetimes. But progress is coming fast and TMD must feel the lifetimes will be sufficient for a TV product in the 2009 time frame to commit to the commercialization.

OLED commercialization has come in fits and starts, first with passive matrix and now with active matrix (all the TVs will be active matrix). A particularly difficult situation has resulted in the last few years for the smaller-sized OLEDs as very sharp LCD price reductions (30-40% per year) have undermined the OLED value proposition. Samsung SDI is clearly leading the charge to commercialize AM-OLEDs, but with these new announcements, it looks like TMD is in the game too. Don’t be surprised to see Sony and LG Electronics ante up soon too.

TMD claims it new 20.8" demo is the world’s largest polymer OLED panel fabricated on a low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) backplane. This was accomplished using newly developed techniques for uniform coating of organic electroluminescent materials and the optimized combination of electrodes and organic materials.

The latest prototype improves upon a 17" panel developed in April 2002 - that’s 5 years ago! Since then, the company has focused on commercializing smaller sized OLED panels on LTPS substrates for use in mobile products.

The new 20.8-inch OLED display employs an ink-jet printing process to deposit the three (RGB) color-emitting layers that use polymer organic electroluminescent materials. In addition to the adoption of a top emission structure, TMD is now managing light at the nanometer level in individual pixels to improve the efficiency of distributing light produced from the color-emitting layers. This has contributed to higher brightness and lower power consumption. The panel features resolution of 1280×768 and16.7M colors.

Current AMOLED processing is limited to 4G-sized equipment, but the hope has been to expand these sizes using some of the new processes, like ink-jet printing. Since TMD has now said they will commercialize TVs, we can assume that they now believe the ink-jet process can indeed be scaled to larger sized to compete cost effectively with LCD or PDP technology.

We have a lot of questions on this announcement and have sent a list to TMD to respond to. But, because they are all at the exhibition in Japan, we will have to publish the answers in the next edition of Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage. Also, expect to see the display at the next SID show in Long Beach, California this May.