Samsung Display has rolled out the Rollable Flex and Sensor OLED Display, innovative technologies that could reshape the Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) industry paradigm.
Samsung Display announced its participation in Display Week 2023 held in Los Angeles, California, from May 23 to 25 (local time), where it is exhibiting a range of next-generation products.
This year, they premiered the Rollable Flex that significantly enhances the portability of tablet PCs and laptops, and the Sensor OLED Display that embeds a fingerprint and blood pressure sensor within the panel, eliminating the need for a separate module and thus introducing new possibilities for display functionality.
The Rollable Flex has expanded the vertical screen length from the previous 49 mm to 254.4 mm, more than a five-fold increase. While the extendibility of current foldable and slidable form factors caps at 2-3 times, the rollable has surpassed this restriction by rolling and unrolling the display around an O-shaped axis, akin to a roll of toilet paper.
A Samsung Display representative remarked, “The standout feature is that we’ve augmented portability by implementing a large-sized display, traditionally cumbersome to carry around, in a rollable form.”
Samsung Display also showcased a novel foldable phone concept dubbed Flex In & Out, capable of folding both inward and outward, allowing 360-degree operations. The in-folding form factor, which can only be folded inward, necessitates a separate external panel for information access when folded, but the Flex In & Out concept transcends this limitation, suggesting the potential for a lighter, thinner foldable phone.
They also introduced a pioneering technology, the Sensor OLED Display, that can identify fingerprints anywhere on the screen and simultaneously check cardiovascular health. The fingerprint sensor in a typical smartphone is fitted beneath the OLED panel as an independent module. Samsung Display devised a method to incorporate an organic photodiode (OPD), a light sensor, directly into the channel when depositing the OLED component. This strategy expands the fingerprint recognition area to encompass the entire panel, giving users the freedom to customize the recognition area as desired.
Furthermore, the integrated OPD panel enables measurement of the user’s heart rate, blood pressure, and stress levels with the simple touch of a finger. This announcement marks the first instance of Samsung Display unveiling panel technology that can simultaneously sense fingerprints and biometric data.
