Today’s Screen Culture Puts Higher Pressure On Display Chips

Just as cathode ray tube technology has been relegated to specialist industrial and medical settings, OLED (organic light-emitting diode) is overtaking LCD (liquid crystal display) in some applications due to its superior image quality and contrast.

But OLED is not a one-size-fits-all. An array of new technologies is being developed to meet consumer demand for better, brighter screens with higher resolution — huge in some cases, tiny in others — as well as being outdoor-capable, flexible, foldable, and much more.

“At display conferences, you’ll see rollable displays coming, stretchable displays, sensors in displays, like solar sensors,” said Sam Toba, director of product marketing at Synaptics. “You already have the regular touch sensors. There will be biometric sensors, so pulse and oxygen levels can be read. Embedded light sensors are already happening. Light sensors are needed to compensate for different kinds of light, whether fluorescent or different color levels. Proximity sensors are important, so you don’t miss-touch when you bring your phone to your face. These sensors will augment touch, and a larger fingerprint area is coming.”

The demand for higher resolution, better color accuracy, and faster response time puts pressure on display chip systems. “The amount of data is getting larger,” said Matthew Graham, senior group director, verification software product management at Cadence. “A lot of display technology is driven by gaming or demand for high pixel rates and high refresh rates, which means lots of high-bandwidth memory, lots of high-bandwidth interconnect. This type of design needs verification tools that can handle very large systems, very high speeds, the ability to run more cycles, more turns of verification faster when you’re using those very large data sets and workloads.”

Displays are becoming more immersive, and users often want multiple screens where previously one was enough. “As the number of displays per system increases, this comes with challenges in bandwidth, power, and signal integrity — especially in automotive and high-resolution entertainment,” said Simon Bussieres, director of product management at Rambus. “As pixel densities rise and refresh rates climb, the interconnect and memory subsystems must scale accordingly to deliver seamless user experiences. Visually lossless compression technologies such as VESA DSC can help interconnects scale commensurate with the needs of advanced display applications, while significantly lowering the bandwidth required.”

Fig. 1: Multi-display use is becoming increasingly common. Source: Infineon

Screens are rapidly multiplying across many sectors, particularly in automotive. “We see many screens in vehicles now,” said Rob Fisher, senior director of product management at Imagination Technologies. “There are screens in the passenger seats, digital mirrors, head-up displays, and infotainment panels. I even saw an illustration of a little mini screen on the top of the gear stick. There are screens everywhere, communicating loads of different things. The communication is very important for these, but the number of screens pushes up the requirements on the GPU.”

Like all edge devices, power becomes a key concern. “It’s always going to come back to the energy — energy and power, specifically, now that so many displays are smart,” said Michal Siwinski, chief marketing officer at Arteris. “You have a lot of AI logic built into this, which means a lot more compute. How do you design it? How do you build it to do that? It’s an AI or machine learning on the edge kind of a problem, and displays are absolutely suffering from it.”

One way to save power is by using low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO), a backplane technology that enables the display to be refreshed less frequently, and which is more common in high-end OLED than LCD.

“All the Apple phones are going to LTPO, and the high-end Androids are also going LTPO,” said Synaptics’ Toba. “With LTPS (low-temperature polycrystalline silicon), everything leaks away, so you have to constantly refresh the display for the image to remain, whereas LTPO has an element that allows the pixels to stay. You can vary the refresh rate and bring it down to 1 Hz. Instead of refreshing at 60 times a second with LTPS, you only need to refresh LTPO once a second, and that means you don’t have to have the host side application processor refresh all the time. It saves power, so that’s the growing segment.”

OLED types and challenges
Mobile phones account for almost 50% of the panel market, so shifts there can signpost future trends elsewhere. “About 1.4 billion phone panels are shipping,” said Toba. “The number of panels that are shipping is higher than the actual phones because of replacement panels, and then there’s a yield loss at the panel factory. LCD is about 700 million units and OLED is almost 800 million units now, so for the first time in mobile phone history, in our FY25 ending June 2025, we saw more OLED shipments in the market than LCDs.”

Other types of OLEDs include the rigid OLED, which is based on a glass substrate. “Only Samsung makes them, but they are shipping at about 161 million,” said Toba. “These are the ones that are eating into the high-end LTPS LCDs. The other big category of OLED is a flexible (FOLED), based on a plastic substrate. That’s the majority, because all the Chinese OLED suppliers are based on this plastic. Some people call it P-OLED technology, and that’s growing really rapidly here.”

Different types of OLED offer various benefits with commensurate challenges.

“When manufacturers design OLED, the three most important things are the brightness, the colorimetric information, and the contrast,” said Sandra Gély, senior application engineering manager at Ansys. “With OLED, you can usually have a very good contrast, so that’s why it’s used. But for the colorimetric information, you can have issues with OLED. You can have color shift. When you look at the OLED screen in the front, or when you look on the side, you can have some issue due to the color. It can be more greenish when you look on the side, or you can have less brightness when you look on the side.”

Typical display components include PMICs; gate drivers to control the flow of current to the display pixels; microcontrollers; and touch controllers, if it has a touch screen. In addition, OLED tends to need a small flash chip to compensate for uneven light among the millions of pixels.

“If they don’t have uniformity, you will see unevenness, a wavy kind of effect even if it’s the same color,” said Toba. “They call that mura. To remove that, they have these compensating algos, and that flash contains the compensating values. It’s like mura flash.”

Fig. 2: A display driver. Source: Synaptics

Image-enhancing features such as demura compensation for different pixel patterns, adaptive brightness, color, and gamma are all achieved through algorithms that can compensate for defects in the screen or make it sharper — especially at the edges — and prevent fringing. “These are different than AI,” said Toba. “They are much more simpler algorithms that basically mask a defect, or mask non-uniformity on the screen because your human eye is really good at telling when something is slightly off, so that needs to be compensated.”

Non-uniformity is one of the key challenges that manufacturers are trying to solve. “That’s why they also invent new technology,” said Gély. “The quantum dot (QD-OLED) allows to have more control on all of these different elements. There is also the microLED, but this technology is still new and still quite expensive. Different technology needs to be cheap enough, and it needs to be efficient in the three criteria.”

In contrast to organic LED, microLED offers longer lifespan due to using inorganic LEDs. The technology uses microscopic gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs for each pixel. These are arranged on a backplane, which is often a thin-film transistor display. The TFT controls each individual LED. MicroLED offers many benefits, but it is difficult and costly to make.

Startup Q-Pixel is taking on these challenges. “MicroLEDs are much smaller than LEDs, they burn much less power, and they’re much brighter,” said Nick Kepler, COO at Silicon Catalyst. “The reason they’re not in every screen that we look at is that so far, they’ve been very, very expensive to make. The only microLED screen on the market today is a Samsung TV that sells for $150,000.”

Q-Pixel has two key innovations to revolutionize microLEDs and make it the next big display screen technology. “The way LEDs work today is you have red, green, and blue LEDs, and you use these three colors in a pixel with three LEDs, and then you turn them on or off to get all the different colors,” said Kepler. “But you need three LEDs in each pixel. Q-Pixel has figured out a way to create a single LED that they can vary the color all the way across the visible color spectrum using a voltage. They can tune the pixel to be whatever color they want, which means each pixel only needs one LED. It’s a third as big as any other microLED, and the microLEDs are already smaller. The other thing they’ve done, which is arguably more important for making microLEDs the technology of the future, is to manufacture them with almost no loss — a 99.99999% yield with a proprietary manufacturing technology that will drive the cost down dramatically, so the TV screens won’t be $150,000 anymore.”

Seeking fewer layers
One benefit of LCDs over OLED is that it is easier to develop touch and display driver integration (TDDI), which means you can remove a film-based sensor.

“The TDDI that we offer is for LCD technology, and for LCD on the panel stack up there is a VCOM layer as part of the display, and that can be segmented into blocks of sensors,” said Toba. “Traditionally, LCD had a film-based sensor on the very top. Now you can use that VCOM layer, which is segmented to sense touch. It means you can get rid of that film, and you can save $2 or $3 on a mobile, maybe $10 to $12 on a large panel. Definitely, panel makers are motivated to save costs so that the end customers can either buy it cheaper or pocket the difference. It makes it not only cheaper, but because you no longer have a film, it’s optically better.”

Removing a layer means there’s less things blocking the light. “That’s happening in the OLED world, as well, where they want to remove the polarizer,” said Toba. “Removing the polarizer saves about 30% of the light blockage. Samsung calls it eco-OLED.”

The polarizer improves visibility in sunlight, because it prevents reflections. If a manufacturer chooses to remove it to make the screen thinner, then they can put light walls between the pixels so that when the light comes in, it doesn’t reflect out of it but bounces into the wall. Even in sunlight, with this new type of structure, they can somewhat overcome the lack of polarizer. This is particularly important in foldable phones and flip phones.

On OLED, it’s not possible to segment the VCOM, and that’s why the technology is still on-cell. “It’s on-cell metal mesh, and the traces go between the pixels,” explained Toba. “The sensor on OLED doesn’t block the light, but with OLED, you have the polarizer, and that is something that blocks the light. People are trying to remove as much as possible. Eventually, people figure out how to do full in-cell OLED. But right now, all the in-cell and TDDI is in LCD.”

Simulation, verification, security
The performance of OLED and LED displays in various environments depends on such aspects such as the emissive properties of the display pixels, the illumination conditions, and human perception. Simulation plays a key role in deciding which technology to use for a particular application. Tools can simulate the nano and microstructure of the pixels, and can provide photometric analysis of the entire macroscopic display in a typical environment.

For example, automotive head-up displays have different requirements to a TV display or a computer display. “It’s a different system, because on the head-up display, you don’t have only the display,” said Ansys’ Gély. “You also have a system in order to project your display on the windshield, on the combiner. Usually, it’s LCD displays that can be used, and it’s the same type of technology that you will have in a TV, but the challenges are different. Usually, you have a small space in the car to put your phone system, so you need to still have the best resolution, brightness, a lot of this with just a very small package area, whereas on the TV you have more pixels and things like that. But it’s using similar technology for the emissivity of the light.”

Foldable displays present more variables. “We will simulate foldable displays in the specific position and analyze to see if it’s working well, if the performance is good, and we can test different positions,” said Gély. “One thing our customers are asking is, when there is some issue about the structure such as stress on one side of the display, how does it impact the foldable display? This can happen, and these are things that we can look at and analyze.”

Whether foldable phones flip open like a clamshell or fold open like a book, the market is still small but growing. “In about five years, it will still be about 80 million units, or a tenth of total mobile OLEDs,” said Toba. “But it’s growing quite rapidly. You can fit them in your pocket. The folds are still a little bit thick, but the latest Samsung is as thin as a regular candy bar phone.”

As designs grow more complex, they can be more susceptible to bugs and errors, such as display artifacts flickering or complete display failure. “The display itself has a lot to do with manufacturing,” said Cadence’s Graham. “But in terms of the systems, verification is genuinely the infinite problem. If you double the gate count or the transistor count, you square the state space. It’s an exponentially large problem and more pixels, more speed equals more gates, which is more potential for bugs.”

DisplayPort, which uses a plug out of the back of a computer to connect a monitor, only adds to the verification challenges. “The reality is that there’s far more DisplayPort that’s active within a device,” said Graham. “Our handheld mobile devices, handheld gaming, or any portable device, laptops, that’s all DisplayPort as well, or similar protocols.”

Security is another challenge. “TV now is really a computer with a display,” said Mike Borza, principal security technologist at Synopsys. “Increasingly, the tuner in the TV is not used, or it’s used selectively. People are streaming a ton, and those things tend to be connected to the internet. For people who own TVs, they have a risk just by having them in their house. For a voice-operated remote control, that microphone can be turned on remotely, and it’s sitting there listening. Whatever is going on in your living room or TV room is what somebody else is monitoring. Big companies recently got caught doing that.”

In automotive, screens can be used for infotainment, but also to convey safety information. In both cases, they can pose a security risk. “Displays are part of the safety systems of the car because they have access to parts of the vehicle control systems,” Borza noted. “Things like backup cameras that you operate through consoles and infotainment screens are security features, or at least features that control or affect the safe operation of the motor vehicle. Those things require security, and it’s being released now into the display links that are coming to and from vehicle displays, as well as the remote cameras that are connected to the central computers that are dealing with the camera inputs.”

Touch display chips and challenges
Touch displays are standard in phones and tablets, and also in new cars. For example, Infineon’s automotive multitouch programmable SoC MCU with an Arm Cortex CPU supports large OLED and micro-LED displays in vehicle infotainment systems.

Fig. 3: An automotive center information display with options for LCD or OLED panel. Source: Infineon

However, in the switch from LCD to OLED, panels get much thinner and the touch sensor becomes much closer to the noisy pixels that transistors are turning on and off.

“As the touch layer gets closer and closer, the background capacitance gets higher and higher,” said Toba.  “Your plates are much closer. With that background capacitance, you have to sense a femtofarads worth of finger signal. It makes it much, much more challenging as you go from LCD to rigid to flex plastic-based, as they’re getting thinner and thinner and thinner.” 

There are two main types of background noise for touch sensors. “One is display to touch noise, D to T, but once you get to LTPO there’s also touch-to-display noise, because what happens with LTPO? You can refresh much less frequently, but it also means that the pixels are now sensitive to the touch signal itself,” he explained. “If the display is too noisy, you can get ghost touches. If the touch is too noisy on LTPO, you can get these streaking artifacts on the display. There’s a lot of things that are making modern panels more and more difficult.”

Fig. 4: A touch controller. Source: Synaptics

Market trends
In the mobile market, LCD has become commoditized. It’s no longer a unique or differentiating feature in smartphones. “There are LTPS panels, and there are amorphous panels,” said Toba. “Part of the thing that’s happening is the amorphous would be the low-end, so about $7 for the panel. About five- to six-inch LTPS is about $18 to $20. LTPS LCD panels have become similar in cost to the low-end OLEDs. Low-end OLEDs are about $20, depending on the features. So LTPS and OLED low-end are almost the same price. There’s been a crossover from LTPS LCD to OLED. If you’re getting a panel, you might as well get the brilliant OLED if it’s the same price. We don’t think the LCD will go away, but LTPS’s are definitely getting eaten up by OLEDs.”

Fig. 5: Touch mobile panel market trends. Source: Synaptics

In head-mount devices featuring near-eye displays, such as MR/VR goggles and AR/AI glasses, OLEDoS (on silicon) is dominating the high-end VR/MR market, while LEDoS shows potential in the AR field, according to a TrendForce report. LEDoS is aiming for full-color display capabilities through two technologies, quantum dot color conversion (QDCC) and a vertical chip stacking structure. “OLEDoS, paired with the BirdBath optical structure, is the current market leader and is one of the few display technologies that span both the VR/MR and AR fields,” the report stated. The birdbath structure has a spherical mirror/combiner (part-mirror) and a beam splitter, which together mimic a two-tier birdbath.

OLED technology in the TV market has stagnated due to three factors — limited supply, Sony shifting from OLED to Mini LED backlighting, and a focus on Gen 8.5 production limiting the flexibility of OLED to cater to different TV sizes, said TrendForce. However, OLED adoption for high-end monitors grew, and is expected to reach nearly 5 million units by 2027, up from 500,000 units in 2023. OLED laptops and tablets could follow the same trend if technical advancements can be made in areas such as tandem structures, oxide backplanes, FMM-less evaporation, and blue phosphorescent materials, said TrendForce.

Counterpoint reported that total OLED panel revenues are expected to decline slightly over 2025 but rebound in 2026. OLED monitor units increased 68% year over year, while OLED notebook PCs declined 18%.

Even with all the moves toward OLED, TrendForce pointed out that LCD technology still offers considerable room for specification enhancements through component optimization. For example, improvements in liquid crystal materials can shorten response time and reduce dizziness. In addition, upgrades in backplane technologies like LTPO can push the PPI limits. And the backlighting system can improve light utilization efficiency with the integration of laser light sources.

Conclusion
The size and shape of displays is constantly evolving, but the main trend is for more of them everywhere, from tiny personal devices to jumbotrons at sports games and massive screens at concerts. Holographic displays, which use a 4K screen to reflect digital content through a glass optic, are already here. Only lifelike holograms may end the screen’s dominance in certain applications, but a common factor in all this technology is semiconductors, and the number and complexity of these chips is growing.

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