Chinese and Korean companies are competing to deploy new OLED materials

The display industries in South Korea and China have successively launched PSF (phosphorescence-sensitized fluorescent) OLEDs, opening up new areas of competition.

According to Korean media ETnews, at SID 2026 held in the United States this month, Samsung Display released and exhibited OLED technology for smartphones equipped with green PSF devices - "Flex Chroma Pixel". Its key feature is that it supports a wide color gamut covering 96% of the BT.2020 standard even at a maximum screen brightness of 3,000 nits.

Image source: Samsung Display

Normally, as the brightness increases, the difficulty of presenting a wide color gamut increases, but the application of PSF components achieves this goal. PSF technology enables relatively long-lived fluorescent materials to absorb large amounts of charge, thereby stimulating phosphorescent materials to emit light. Applying this technology can narrow the wavelength of light, improve energy efficiency, and present richer colors.

Starting from 2026, Chinese display manufacturers will also begin to apply green PSF technology in domestic smartphones, with the same goal of reaching the BT.2020 color gamut standard. It is expected that there will be fierce technical competition.

According to reports, BOE has supplied a small amount of green PSF OLED panels to Huawei's smartphones released at the beginning of this year, realizing the commercialization of green PSF OLED panels, and plans to continue to supply subsequent models to be released in the second half of the year. Visionox has also developed green PSF technology in cooperation with US company Universal Display (UDC) and has been supplying this technology to smartphone manufacturers since the end of last year. However, Visionox’s customers have not yet been made public.

It is reported that BT.2020 is a color gamut standard developed in 2012 for ultra-high definition TV broadcasts, also known as Rec.2020. This standard is used in ultra-high definition, 4K, 8K broadcast and content production fields.

The displays used by smartphone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung Electronics comply with the DCI-P3 standard with more than 99% color gamut coverage. According to Samsung Display, this is approximately equivalent to 70% of the BT.2020 standard.

Analysts believe that display panel manufacturers will start applying PSF technology from green, where material research is relatively mature and material substitution effects are significant, thereby demonstrating the possibility of the future evolution of smartphone OLEDs.

In the long term, PSF technology is expected to enable phosphorescent applications in blue, which currently still uses fluorescent materials. Theoretically, the efficiency of phosphorescence in converting electrical energy into light is close to 100%, which is four times that of fluorescence (25%). However, due to the shorter blue wavelength and greater energy, the life of blue phosphorescent materials is shorter and the display screen is less stable.

A display expert said: "Although PSF has the effect of improving color purity, the industry as a whole hopes to use smartphones as a carrier to improve efficiency. As materials such as fluorescence, phosphorescence, and hosts continue to increase, the difficulty of uniform evaporation also increases, so the verification of mass production efficiency will become the key to future commercialization." (Translated from ETnews)

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