Fraunhofer Institute Marks World Record – OLED Microdisplay with 10,000 dpi in 28 nm Technology on 300mm Wafers
18 July 2023: At the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP, OLED microdisplays have been realized for the first time in a 28-nanometer backplane technology on 300mm wafers within the “Backplane” project funded by Saxon State Ministry of Economics, Labor and Transport (SMWA).
Components with a display diagonal of 0.18 inches and pixel sizes of only 2.5 micrometers have been manufactured. This corresponds to a pixel density of 10,000 dpi – an as-yet unattained level in the global OLED microdisplay market.
The newly developed OLED microdisplays have a resolution of 1,440 × 1,080 pixels in monochrome or 720 × 540 pixels in full color. On the one hand, the flexible display architecture allows the refresh rate to be reduced to 0 Hz in extreme cases when the display content remains unchanged, thus avoiding all unnecessary data transfer – an enormous advantage for power consumption.
Conventional displays require a minimum refresh rate here, regardless of content. On the other hand, the new microdisplay also allows frame rates of up to 480 Hz in extreme cases – internally even up to several kHz. This has been made possible by a programmable sequence control in combination with a display-integrated frame buffer.
Depending on the design, the new displays can be used in lifestyle products such as sports glasses or as head-mounted displays in motorcycle helmets, in industrial scenarios for wearables in logistics or for remote maintenance solutions. The now even smaller dimensions pave the way for even more ergonomic systems.
The new OLED microdisplays will be offered by Fraunhofer FEP as evaluation kits to provide interested customers with access and testing opportunities for their own system integration and to enable joint customer-specific microdisplay developments with industry.
In Silicon Saxony, work on forward-looking innovations is carried out daily. Fraunhofer FEP, as part of this closely interlinked network, is the leading institute for the development of customer- and application-specific microdisplays and sensors based on OLED-on-silicon technology.
The institute’s continuous microdisplay developments in recent years have been driven by various requirements such as pixel density, energy efficiency, color, brightness, or frame rate. Fraunhofer FEP has developed a wide range of microdisplays in full-color or monochrome, from ultra-low power versions to high-resolution variants for the use in augmented- (AR) and virtual-reality (VR) applications and other wearables.
www.fraunhofer.de
