In an August 2024 supply chain report from Patently Apple we noted that market research firm DSCC predicted that, "If Apple's demand continues to be absolute in the hybrid IT organic light-emitting diode (OLED) market, hybrid OLED production capacity will be sufficient to respond with the 6th generation lines of LG Display and Samsung Display that are already in operation, and the 8th generation lines of Samsung Display and BOE that are currently investing." Hybrid OLEDs are also known as Two-Stack OLED displays."

Today, LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced that it has become the world’s first company to successfully verify the commercialization-level performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels on a mass production line. The achievement comes about eight months after the company partnered with UDC to develop blue phosphorescence, and is considered a significant step closer to realizing a “dream OLED” display.

In the display industry, “dream OLED” refers to an OLED panel that achieves phosphorescence for all three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). OLED panel light emission methods are broadly categorized into fluorescence and phosphorescence. Fluorescence is a simpler process in which materials emit light immediately upon receiving electrical energy, but its luminous efficiency is only 25%. In contrast, phosphorescence briefly stores received electrical energy before emitting light. Although it is technically more complex, this method offers luminous efficiency of 100% and uses a quarter as much power as fluorescence.

However, achieving blue phosphorescence has remained a major challenge even more than 20 years after the commercialization of red and green phosphorescence. This is due to blue, among the three primary colors, having the shortest wavelength and demanding the greatest energy.

LG Display has solved this issue by using a hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure, with blue fluorescence in the lower stack and blue phosphorescence in the upper stack. By combining the stability of fluorescence with the lower power consumption of phosphorescence, it consumes about 15% less power while maintaining a similar level of stability to existing OLED panels.

In particular, LG Display is the first to succeed in reaching the commercialization stage of blue phosphorescent OLED panels, where performance evaluation, optical characteristics, and processability on actual mass production lines should all be confirmed. The company has already completed commercialization verification with UDC.

LG Display has independently filed patents for its hybrid blue phosphorescent OLED technology in both South Korea and the United States.

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The company will showcase a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology at SID Display Week 2025, the world’s largest display event, in San Jose, California from May 11^th.

At the show, LG Display will be unveiling a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology applied to a small and medium-sized panel that can be applied to IT devices such as smartphones and tablets. As more and more products require high definition and high efficiency such as AI PCs and AR/VR devices, the application of blue phosphorescence technology is expected to expand rapidly.

“The successful commercialization of blue phosphorescence technology, which has been called the final piece of the ‘dream OLED’ puzzle, will become an innovative milestone towards the next generation of OLED,” said Soo-young Yoon, CTO and Executive Vice President of LG Display. “We expect to secure a leading position in the future display market through blue phosphorescence technology.”

Considering  the Apple pushed LG and Samsung to produce tandem OLED displays, we can safely assume that that Apple will at some point in the future adopt LG's hybrid tandem OLED displays for various Apple devices.