Kim Byung-gu, the head of LG Display’s automotive business group and executive vice president, unveiled LG Display’s OLED displays designed for automotive use and introduced the entire portfolio of premium brands involved in automotive production and development for the first time at IMID 2023, which started on Aug. 23 at the BEXCO convention center in Busan.
LG Display has made its first-ever unveiling of an “alliance” of OLED displays for vehicles, including brands such as Jaguar and Porsche. With this move, the company expressed its ambition to achieve a market share of over 50% in terms of revenue in the premium vehicle display market by 2026.
LG Display is participating in IMID 2023, which is being held at BEXCO Busan for three days starting on Aug. 23, where it will showcase its proprietary technology in automotive-grade and large organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays. IMID, hosted by the Korea Information Display Society, stands as the largest domestic academic conference in the realm of displays, drawing over 2,000 experts from the display industry each year.
During the opening ceremony, Kim Byung-gu, the head of LG Display’s automotive business group and executive vice president, introduced the direction of the vehicle display business through his keynote speech.
Kim said, “As automobiles evolve into ‘smartphones on wheels,’ vehicle displays will play a crucial role. The vehicle display market is expected to see high growth, averaging around 10 percent annually, until 2030.”
In particular, he mentioned, “LG Display’s vehicle OLED, which successfully entered mass production in 2019, is gaining recognition for its value in the premium automotive market. Vehicle OLED is experiencing rapid growth at an annual average of 28 percent, while LTPS LCD is driving the market with an annual average growth of 13 percent.”
Kim stated that he will drive the car display business forward by leveraging three key technologies, Plastic (P)-OLED, Advanced Thin OLED (ATO), and LTPS LCD, in line with the era of automotive transformation.
P-OLED is a premium lineup that utilizes flexible plastic substrates, maintaining excellent image quality while being lightweight and bendable. ATO represents a new cost-effective product that uses glass substrates, and LTPS LCD offers advantages in terms of larger size and higher resolution compared to traditional LCDs.
Kim also explained the evolution of LG Display’s pioneering industry-first core technology, the “Tandem OLED component.” LG Display’s vehicle OLEDs feature the Tandem OLED component structure where two organic emitting layers are stacked to achieve exceptional durability and reliability, such as higher brightness and extended lifespan compared to a single-layer OLED structure.
Kim added, “This year, we are in mass production of the second-generation Tandem OLED, which has seen improvements of over 30 percent in brightness and over 40 percent in power consumption compared to the first generation. Currently, we are also developing the third-generation Tandem OLED, which offers an additional 20 percent improvement in brightness and a 20 percent reduction in power consumption compared to the second generation.”
Furthermore, he stated that LG Display aims to lead a new leap in vehicle displays through innovations in display form factors, including large OLEDs and slidable, rollable, and transparent OLEDs, in the future.
Kim introduced the nine premium automotive brands in Europe, North America, and South Korea that are currently using or developing vehicles with LG Display’s vehicle OLEDs. These brands include Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, GM, Porsche, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, and Lucid.
He said, “Based on the continuous delivery of customer value and high-quality orders based on future technology, we aim to achieve a market share of over 50 percent in terms of revenue in the premium vehicle display market by 2026.”
LG Display has set up a special exhibition space where visitors can directly experience various products, including the industry-first 18-inch vehicle rollable OLED, vehicle P-OLED panels, 3rd-generation OLED TV panels with meta technology, and gaming OLED panels.
The 18-inch vehicle rollable OLED panel, which was unveiled for the first time in South Korea, features a tandem component structure applied to the rollable panel, resulting in a brighter and clearer screen. It maintains a smooth display even after being rolled and unrolled over 100,000 times and ensures durability for commercial use, operating flawlessly in extreme environments ranging from minus 40 degrees to 85 degrees Celsius.
In addition, LG Display also showcased attention-grabbing innovations such as a 15.6-inch light field display that allows viewers to watch 3D stereoscopic images without special glasses and a 0.42-inch OLED On Silicon (OLEDoS) that delivers an even more immersive augmented reality experience with an ultra-high resolution of 3,500 PPI.
During the IMID event, LG Display plans to unveil 15 research papers on next-generation display technologies such as the development of high-efficiency OLED components, performance enhancements for large OLEDs, and technologies like new OLED, Micro LED and glasses-free 3D.