Kopin debuts 1280×720 OLED microdisplay, forms joint venture with Chinese partners for production
The Lightning 720p OLED microdisplay is 0.49-inch diagonal size, delivers over 1000 nits of brightness while being low power. Power consumption for the 720p display backplane running at 60Hz is less than 40mW.
“We are pleased with the rapid progress in our OLED displays,” said Dr. John C.C. Fan, Kopin’s president and CEO. “Using our proprietary backplane technology and the efforts of our OLED foundry partner Olightek, we have made significant brightness improvements in a very short period of time. We introduced our first OLED microdisplay on silicon, 2k x 2k Lightning display, at last year’s CES and it generated tremendous enthusiasm among the VR community. Now we introduce a new 720p display for mobile entertainment applications and we are excited that our partner Pico Interactive has already designed it into the ‘Eagle’ Mobile Theater, a CES 2018 Innovation Awards Honoree.”
In addition to the technical advances, establishing mass production to meet the demands for high volume consumer and enterprise applications is well underway. With OLED partner Yunnan OLiGHTEK Opto-electronics Technology Co. Ltd. (Olightek), Kopin expects to begin production of the Lightning OLED displays in 2Q this year using a new state-of-the-art OLED deposition system, which was co-funded by both companies.
Additionally the joint venture with BOE Technology Group Co. Ltd. and Olightek has already secured land in Kunming, China and is ready to start construction of the world’s largest OLED on silicon factory.
According to market research firm Insight Media, the new JV is being capitalized with about $150M with BOE the major shareholder. The new OLED-on-Silicon manufacturing facility is expected to be operational in the first half of 2019. The initial capacity is expected to be about 1 million OLED microdisplays per year, and the longer term goal is to establish the largest OLED-on-Silicon capacity in the world.
Until the new facility is built Kopin and Olightek have entered into an agreement to expand Olightek’s current OLED manufacturing capacity by sharing the cost to procure additional deposition equipment for OLED-on-Silicon microdisplays. The new line is expected to produce displays in the first quarter of 2018. The intention is that this capacity will be able to meet initial demand and also allow potential customers to design products with the OLED microdisplays until the BOE facility is in production.
Kopin – www.kopin.com
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