SID Presents the "Oscars" of the Display Industry

Every year the Society for Information Display (SID) holds Display Week, the world’s largest event for the display industry, where it spills its guts about future products and technology.
Now in its 60th year, the annual International Symposium, Seminar and Exhibition was held last month at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Given that in the fiercely competitive display market you are only as good your latest innovation, here are some of the new and notable introductions that made headlines.

TCL CSOT (TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology) introduced the world's first 65-inch 8K ink-jet printed flexible OLED display. This largest flexible OLED foldable screen based on ink-jet printing technology offers high resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. The screen uses IGZO TFT backplane technology (indium gallium zinc oxide, a metal oxide semiconductor) and employs high-precision ink-jet printing technology to present a smooth display with a jaw-dropping 33 million pixels per frame. Combining ultra-thin and high-strength flexible module materials, the display has a bending radius (the minimum radius one can bend it without damaging it or shortening its life) of less than R25mm (the R means radius, while the number is millimeters) and a bending life of up to 100,000 times. When you're not watching it, at the push of a button TCL’s latest concept folds in half backwards and is lowered into a small coffee table where it’s protected by a layer of glass that closes on top of it.

Tianma demonstrated microLED transparent display prototypes, stating that the main application for such displays is in the automotive sector where it can be widely used in car windows and head-up displays. The active-matrix microLED is produced on an LTPS (low-temperature polycrystalline silicon) backplane. LTPS backplanes have higher electron mobility and can turn pixels on/off faster. The display achieves higher transmittance by optimizing pixel design and the TFT stacking process.

A 9.94” triple-fold (“Z” shape) display allows it to be fully expanded and used as a tablet or, when needed, folded to be used as a smartphone. This provides greater flexibility, making it suitable for both work and personal use, such as mobile office, gaming or watching videos.

For automotive applications, an 8.75" panel offers a resolution of 880x480 (114 PPI), brightness of 800 nits and transparency of over 70 percent. Another Tianma display offers a similar panel in terms of resolution and brightness, but this display offers lower reflection (under 4 percent, compared to over 10 percent in other panels) and a reduced transparency (65 percent). Utilizing black material (BPDL) plus AR film to achieve improved image quality, this panel makes objects behind the screen look clearer.

Samsung’s QD-OLED Display was one of the winners of Display of the Year. The prestigious award, jointly given also to Jade Bird Display, was unveiled during Display Week.

Samsung Display Company’s quantum-dot OLED (QD-OLED) Display uses advanced nanoscale materials that emit precise wavelengths of light. Its innovations range from QDs to blue self-emitting pixels and an oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) backplane. QD-OLED has red and green quantum dot material printed on each pixel, which works in harmony with blue light self-emitting pixels and an oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) backplane. This is all packaged together in a three-layer structure that makes slim design aesthetics possible while achieving exceptional performance. Blue OLED source light is photoconverted into precise red and green light, creating color using color conversion. The updated blue OLEDs result in longer lifetime and better brightness. When expressing the primary colors of QD-OLED, the narrow bandwidth characteristic offers a pure color spectrum that has the capability to create more than 90 percent coverage of the BT.2020 standard and more than 99 percent coverage of the Digital Cinema Initiatives–Protocol 3 (DCI-P3) color space.

Thanks to its dome-shaped flux structure and being a top-layer emission display, wherever you’re sitting you can appreciate the excellent visuals. Eighty percent of its luminance is maintained even when 60 degrees off-axis, keeping colors life-like from different angles.

Jade Bird Display’s AmµLED series of MicroLED Displays has an active area of 0.13” (3.3 mm) in diagonal and a resolution of 640X480, possibly making it the world's smallest and brightest VGA display panel. The panels deliver luminance of up to 0.75 million nits, five million nits and one million nits for red, green and blue (RGB), respectively, with a power consumption of only a few hundred milliwatts under average operation conditions. Because of its compact footprint, high brightness, micro lens array (PixelOptics) and end-of-line uniformity (demura) correction, this display has been widely accepted by original equipment manufacturers developing information-based augmented reality (AR) systems, such as smart glasses, sports AR glasses and goggles, holographic sights, sports optics and head-up displays for motorcycles.

The People's Choice Awards are decided by display enthusiasts from around the world who vote for their favorite technology, components, demonstrations and interactive booths on the show floor. Voting was conducted through a survey in the Display Week app May 23-24. Each winner was honored with a blue ribbon.

Best MicroLED-Based Technology

• LG Display for its 12-inch 20% Stretchable Display
• PlayNitride for its 166-inch Portrait Seamless MicroLED Modular Display

Best AR/VR/MR Demo Product

• BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., for its 1.3-inch 4K4K Micro-OLED
• PlayNitride for its 0.49-inch FHD High-Color-Saturation MicroLED Microdisplay

Best OLED Technology

• LG Display for its 77-inch 8K Meta OLED Display
• Samsung Display for its 77-inch QD-OLED TV
• TCL CSOT for its 65-inch 8K inkjet printing technology

Best Automotive Display

• BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., for its Automotive Intelligent Cockpit
• Tianma for its 27-in. DREAM Automotive Display

And, finally, the Display Component of the Year. This award recognizes novel components that have significantly enhanced the performance of a display. A component is sold as a separate part destined to be incorporated into a display. A component may also include display-enhancing materials and/or parts fabricated with new processes. The winner was EMD Electronics’ Low-Temperature Atomic Layer Deposition Material Enabling Thin-Film Encapsulation for Flexible OLED Displays.

Atomic layer deposition thin-film encapsulation (ALD TFE) technology enables flexible OLEDs in display devices by achieving thinner dimensions, higher reliability and longer lifetime compared to conventional TFE technologies. EMD Electronics’ low-temperature ALD silicon materials were first introduced in 2022 for automotive OLEDs and are expected to become an enabling encapsulation technology for upcoming flexible IT OLED displays.