Panels built with LG’s latest OLED process are said to hit 1.6 times the brightness and 2.4 times the lifespan of current ones, all while consuming 13 percent less power. Those figures aren’t really the story, though. What LG had to abandon to reach them is.
The company has pulled the wraps off a production technique it calls FLiPP — FMM-less Innovative Pixel Patterning. It does away with the metal masks OLED manufacturing has relied on for years, proof that even a mature display technology hasn’t run out of headroom.
What a fine metal mask actually does
The conventional approach builds OLED panels with metal plates perforated by minuscule holes — fine metal masks. Light travels through the openings to stencil organic LEDs into a pixel layout. Picture an extremely tiny, extremely costly spray paint template.
The template is also the bottleneck. Manufacturing these masks is both finicky and pricey. Scale them up to the dimensions a TV panel demands and they start to sag, which throws off alignment.
That sagging isn’t a minor tolerance issue — it’s a hard ceiling, and a big reason why pushing this style of patterning to larger sizes has been such a slog.
Photolithography instead of a stencil
With FLiPP, RGB pixels get stenciled straight onto the panel in a precise sequence. Photolithography and UV light then step in to “erase unnecessary areas during OLED pixel patterning,” according to LG.
Take away the mask and the sagging problem goes with it. That’s the basis for LG’s second claim: the method is “free from panel size and resolution constraints.”
In theory, then, one process serves both big-screen televisions and VR display panels — two product categories that usually occupy opposite extremes of the pixel density scale.
The mother glass test is the one to watch
Brightness and longevity make the headlines. Yield is what moves price tags.
During testing, LG says it produced an OLED laptop panel from a single sheet of mother glass, squeezing up to 64 percent more utilization out of that glass than earlier technology managed.
“As a result, less substrate material is wasted and FLiPP directly translates into higher productivity and lower manufacturing costs,” the company said.
That’s the manufacturer’s own spin, and it deserves some skepticism until actual panels ship. Still, substrate utilization ranks among the least fuzzy numbers in display production — the panel either fits on the glass or it doesn’t.
Tablets and monitors first, wearables and TVs later
None of this is confined to a research lab. LG plans to deploy the technology in tablets and monitors first, before broadening it to “cover a range of products from 1-inch wearable devices to ultra-large TVs… tailoring products to customer needs.”
Getting a 1-inch wearable screen and an ultra-large TV out of related process technology is precisely the argument for ditching the mask.
The snag: LG hasn’t said when the first FLiPP-based OLED products will actually hit shelves. Without a date attached, the 1.6x brightness and 2.4x lifespan claims describe a process in testing, not the specifications of anything you can purchase.
Anyone in the market for an OLED tablet or monitor today shouldn’t let this alter their plans for the year. Keep an eye out for the first LG tablet or monitor announced with FLiPP on board, and see whether that 13 percent power saving actually materializes in the battery rating.