TECH

LG Display manufactures blue phosphorescent OLED panel prototypes: Lower-power panels coming to smartphones

LG Display has successfully manufactured prototypes of its hybrid tandem OLED panels using phosphorescent blue OLED technology. The panels are more efficient than conventional OLED panels, reducing power consumption by 15%.

Korean manufacturer LG Display today announced it has successfully verified the “commercialization level” performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels.

The announcement comes eight months after LG Display partnered with OLED technology company Universal Display Corporation on the development of blue phosphorescence, a necessary next step in creating a “Dream OLED” display.

According to LG Display’s release, the company was able to make the technology mass production-ready using a “hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure, with blue fluorescence in the lower stack and blue phosphorescence in the upper stack.” This approach differs from previous OLED display panels, which use a blue fluorescent layer paired with red and green phosphorescent layers.

The issue with using a fluorescent layer in OLED panels is that it provides only 25% light efficiency compared to a phosphorescent layer, which provides 100% light efficiency. LG Display’s hybrid approach changes things up in “combining the stability of fluorescence with the lower power consumption of phosphorescence.” By doing so, it “consumes about 15% less power while maintaining a similar level of stability to existing OLED panels,” according to the company.

LG plans to demonstrate its blue phosphorescent OLED panel with two-stack Tandem technology at SID Display Week, an event that gets underway on May 11, 2025 in San Jose, California.

Has the Dream OLED TV finally arrived?...While LG Display’s announcement is intriguing, the blue phosphorescent OLED panel it plans to display at SID Display Week will showcase the technology in “a small and medium-sized panel that can be applied to IT devices such as smartphones and tablets.”

That means the current iteration of the tech, while mass production-ready (LG Display says it has “completed commercialization verification with UDC”) remains in prototype form, and is not ready for introduction in larger displays such as the best OLED TVs.

mundophone