“Dream OLED” refers to an OLED panel that achieves phosphorescence for all three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). LG Display will show its “dream OLED” at SID Display Week 2025.

Considered to be the final piece of the ‘dream OLED’ puzzle, blue phosphorescence technology was an elusive goal until recently, but LG Display 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.

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.

Small and medium-sized panels for now

In particular, LG Display is, the company says, 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.

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 11th – 16th, which serves as a key gathering for leaders and innovators across the global display industry.

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. LG’s huge displays are not using the technology yet, and it may take a while before we see it applied to TV sets. LG Display notes that “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.”

For now, though, if you want a TV with a large display, the technology available from LG, since early 2025, uses a Primary RGB Tandem structure, which is LG Display’s proprietary technology that uses independent stacks of RGB elements to produce light. It had previously used a three- stack light source, with two layers of blue elements emitting relatively short energy wavelengths alongside red, green, and yellow elements in a single layer.

Primary RGB Tandem technology

LG Display’s fourth-generation OLED TV panel meets the performance demands of the most advanced AI TVs, interacting in real-time with the TV’s on-device AI to deliver the perfect picture in any environment. 33% brighter than the previous generation and optimized for the AI TV era, it is the industry’s first- ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits (1 nit is the brightness produced by a candle).

Panels with both high brightness and energy efficiency are essential for AI TVs, as they use upscaling that analyzes content in real time to deliver ultra-high picture quality of up to 8K. The industry also considers higher brightness to be a key picture quality factor because it enables more vivid images that are akin to natural human vision. But “dream OLED” panels are coming…

“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.”

The Tandem technology behind the “dream OLED” solutions has been used since 2019, when LG Display first commercialized it. First applied to automotive OLEDs, which have particularly high-quality standards, to disperse energy and allow them to operate more reliably for longer periods of time, the Tandem OLEDs are also considered optimal for IT products that require a relatively high amount of screen time, such as laptops, monitors, and tablets.

A 13-inch Tandem OLED panel

The company started mass production of the industry’s first 13-inch Tandem OLED panel for laptops in June 2024. Tailored specifically for laptops – like the Dell XPS 13, one of the first laptops to use the panel – the technology can deliver double the lifespan and triple the brightness of a conventional single-layer OLED display, while reducing power consumption by up to 40%, making it ideal for high-performance IT devices like AI laptops as well as regular laptops.

By designing the components and enhancing the structure of the 13-inch Tandem OLED panel, LG Display has been able to make it around 40% thinner and 28% lighter than existing OLED laptop screens, enabling sleek design and greater portability.

The new panel combines convenience and performance with high definition. It boasts a WQXGA+ (2880×1800) high resolution and accurate color expression that meets 100% of the DCI-P3 standard color area established by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), allowing high-definition content to be presented with increased clarity.

With OLED’s characteristic self-emissive pixels and infinite contrast ratio, it has also been certified as Display HDR (High Dynamic Range) True Black 500 by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). This confirms its ability to show both bright and dark images so well that it enhances their three-dimensionality and produces a display quality that is as close as possible to what the human eye naturally sees.

In addition, LG Display embedded a touch sensor inside the panel to improve touch performance and realized a highly sensitive total touch solution. As a result, it provides a precise touch experience.

“We will continue to strengthen the competitiveness of OLED products for IT applications and offer differentiated customer value based on distinctive strengths of Tandem OLED, such as long life, high brightness, and low power consumption,” said Jae-Won Jang, Vice President and Head of the Medium Display Product Planning Division at LG Display.