LG Hits Major Milestone Towards Its 'Dream OLED' Display Tech
LG Display calls the upgraded form Hybrid Tandem OLED, describing the way in which its researchers stacked two blue light-emitting elements for each pixel. For the better part of two decades, the red and green elements of an OLED pixel were already of the phosphorescent type, meaning they store power and emit it in the form of light in a highly efficient manner, reportedly with 100% efficiency, and low power consumption.
Due to technological limitations, however, blue elements have historically been fluorescent—easy to produce and light up, but only with about a 25% energy-to-light ratio, at a comparatively high power consumption. The underlying reason is that blue is by far the hardest color for which to produce light, as it has the shorter wavelength and therefore requires a lot of power compared to other colors. This is also the reason why the blue element burns out first in OLED panels, and why it took decades and a Nobel prize winner for a blue LED to exist, to begin with.
LG Display found a way to stack two blue elements together: a lower layer with fluorescent blue for long lifetime, resting underneath a top layer with a novel new phosphorescent blue for high output. Overall, the company expects a 15% lower power consumption than before, presumably when considering an entire pixel. LG claims it's the first to reach mass production of OLED panels with this tech, thanks to an eight-month partnership with Universal Display Corporation.
The new panels are coming in "small and medium-size", which LG correlates with phones and tablets. This should come as welcome news for Apple, Samsung, Dell and others, which are all customers of LG Display. As for TVs, the company's fourth-generation OLED panels are bright and healthy. Your guess is as good as ours as to what this means for PC displays, but here's to hoping these panels materialize in computer monitors sooner rather than later.
