TCL makes OLED more affordable and brighter with new inkjet printing technology

CSOT, which is TCL's manufacturing arm, has been making some solid strides with its inkjet-printed OLED tech, showing off big gains in efficiency and cutting production costs. Ming-Jong Jou, who heads up the Technology Planning Center, shared these updates at the Omdia Korea Display Conference.

Instead of sticking with the usual evaporation process for making OLEDs, this new method uses precision inkjet printers, switching things up quite a bit. Thanks to this shift, they've managed to cut internal light loss by 50 percent and boost light output efficiency by about 1.5 times.

While inkjet printing is already used in OLED production to add encapsulation layers and apply quantum dots in Samsung's QD-OLEDs, TCL CSOT took it further. They're using it for emitters and other stack materials, which helps them better use their resources—hitting up to 90 percent material efficiency. That's twice as good as the previous ways of doing things. And on top of that, they've reduced blue light emissions by 50 percent.

This technology isn't just about efficiency, though. It's also driving down manufacturing costs by 20 percent and speeding up product development by 30 percent. They've already shown off several implementations of this technology, like a 65-inch 8K curved OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and 1800R curvature, plus a 31-inch 4K dome-shaped OLED and a 14-inch 2.8K laptop display.

The company plans to start small-scale production towards the end of 2024, starting with 21.6-inch 4K OLED panels for medical monitors. Then, in 2025, they're looking to branch out into making medium-sized OLED panels for computing devices, too.