30 October 2008

Samsung Develops Ultrathin
'Flapping' OLED Panel with Thickness 0.05 mm

Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. of South Korea developed an ultra-thin flexible OELD panel with a thickness of just 0.05 mm that was hung in the air and fluttering in the breeze from a fan at the Flat Panel Display (FPD) International in Japan.

The 4-inch ultrathin OEL prototype panel features a sub-HD resolution of 480 x 272. The panel can be bent thanks to its slimness and looks like the perfect solution for the curved devices like the Nokia’s nWave concept phone.

According to the Tech-On, Samsung’s 'flapping' display panel can reproduce 16,700,000 colors, which is 100% of the NTSC colour gamut, luminance is 200 cd/m2 with contrast ratio of 1,000:1.

"It is technically possible to make the panel thinner," a Samsung staffer said. "However, it is difficult to further reduce the thicknesses of the flexible substrates and circuit components around it." That's why the company set the size at 0.05mm.

To achieve this thickness, Samsung etched an OLED panel that uses a normal glass substrate. The drive circuit was formed by low-temperature polysilicon TFTs. Also, low-molecular organic EL materials were employed.

The panel was not sealed by a glass substrate but by membrane sealing technology using a sputtering method. That's why the 0.05mm thickness is almost the thickness of the drive circuit board.