Apple Inc.

Universal Display Corporation

Princeton University

Bhadrinarayana Lalgudi Visweswaran

Abbas Jamshidi Roudbari

Warren S Rieutort-Louis

Tsung-Ting Tsai

Prashant Mandlik

Jae Won Choi

Shih Chang Chang

Ting-Kuo Chang

Yuchi Che

Paul Stephen Drzaic

Shyuan Yang

Cheng-Chih Hsieh

Hoon Sik Kim

Chin-Wei Lin

Ruiqing Ma

Jean-Pierre Simon Guillou

Hirokazu Yamagata

Myung-Kwan Ryu

Sigurd Richard Wagner

Zhen Zhang

Chang-Chia Huang

Terry C Lam

Yasmin F Afsar

Takahide Ishii

Tiffany T Moy

Ankit Mahajan

Seonpil Jang

Keisuke Otsu

Yun Yu Wang

John Z Zhong

Cheng Kai Chen

Rui Liu

Chieh-Wei Chen

Yu Cheng Chen

Cheng-Ho Yu

Jungmin Lee

Tyler Robin Kakuda

Young Cheol Yang

Yifan Zhang

Xiaowei Wu

Meng-Huan Ho

Izhar Zahoor Ahmed

Christopher Edward Glazowski

Tae-Wook Koh

Minhyuk Choi

Shang-Chih Lin

Fan Gui

Mohammad Hajirostam

Sinan Alousi

Ricardo A Peterson

Mohammad Reza Esmaeili Rad

Han Liu

Sungki Lee

Chih-Lei Chen

Ki Yeol Byun

Yuxi Zhao

Kyounghwan Kim

Xin Lin

Supriya Goyal

Yun Liu

Ran Tu

Chih Jen Yang

Wen-I Hsieh

Themistoklis Afentakis

Levent Erdal Aygun

Chia-hao Chang

Aida Raquel Colon-Berrios

Jonathan H Beck

Soojin Park

Hui Lu

Amin Salehi

Kuan-yi Lee

David L Wei

Asli Sirman

Fuyi Yang

Ben Hightower

Zhichun Shao

Michelle C Sherrott

Ko-Wei Chen

Sarfaraz Moh

An electronic device may have a display such as an organic light-emitting diode display. The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display may have an array of organic light-emitting diode pixels that each have OLED layers interposed between a cathode and an anode. A first passivation layer, a first planarization layer, and a second passivation layer may be formed over the cathode. The first and second passivation layers may be formed from inorganic material. A second planarization layer may be formed over the second passivation layer between the second passivation layer and a polarizer. The second planarization layer may planarize the polarizer at the edges of the active area of the display where the polarizer would otherwise have a steep taper. Planarizing the polarizer in this way mitigates undesirable secondary reflections off of the polarizer. The first and second planarization layers may be formed from organic material.

Organic light-emitting diode displays with planarization layers

An organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display may have an array of pixels that each have OLED layers interposed between a cathode and an anode. The display may also include a planarization layer that is deposited using inkjet printing. To mitigate the need for dam structures to prevent overflow of the planarization layer during inkjet printing, capillary-flow-inducing structures may be included in the inactive area of the display. The topology of the capillary-flow-inducing structures may be propagated to a passivation layer such that an upper surface of the passivation layer has a similar topology as the capillary-flow-inducing structures. The planarization layer therefore undergoes capillary flow when deposited on the upper surface of the passivation layer. The capillary-flow-inducing structures may be formed from dots, rectangular strips, or trapezoidal strips. The capillary-flow-inducing structures may be formed from the same material as spacers in the active area or using another layer in the display.

Organic light-emitting diode displays with capillary-flow-inducing structures

The circular polarizer may be omitted from a display to increase efficiency. A polarizer-free display may use other non-polarizer techniques to mitigate reflections of ambient light and mitigate diffraction reflection artifacts. The polarizer-free display may include a black pixel definition layer that absorbs ambient light. Color filter elements may be included in a black matrix to mitigate ambient light reflections. An intra-anode phase shift layer and/or an inter-anode phase shift layer may be included in the display to mitigate diffractive reflection artifacts. Multiple sub-pixels of the same color may be used in a single pixel to ensure a neutral reflection color. The display may include a cathode layer that is patterned to have openings over the black pixel definition layer to mitigate reflections. The display may include diffusive particles (in the color filter element or in a separate diffuser layer) to mitigate diffractive reflection artifacts.

Polarizer-free displays

A light emitter that operates through a display may cause display artifacts, even when the light emitter operates using non-visible wavelengths. To mitigate artifacts caused by a light emitter operating through a display, the display may have a higher density of thin-film transistor sub-pixels than emissive sub-pixels. This allows for a region in the display to include emissive sub-pixels but be free of thin-film transistor sub-pixels. The light emitter may operate through this region in the display. Additionally, to reduce the amount of space occupied in the inactive area of a display by gate driver circuitry, at least a portion of the gate driver circuitry may be positioned in the active area of the display. To accommodate the gate driver circuitry, emissive sub-pixels may be laterally shifted relative to corresponding thin-film transistor sub-pixels.

Display with a transmitter under an active area

In devices with flexible displays, multilayer adhesive stacks may be included. A multilayer adhesive may attach a flexible display panel to the display cover layer in an electronic device. Including multiple layers of adhesive in the adhesive stack (as opposed to a single layer) provides more degrees of freedom for the tuning and optimization of the properties of the adhesive stack. The multilayer adhesive stack therefore has better performance than if only a single layer of adhesive is used. The multilayer adhesive stack may include one or more layers of soft adhesive, hard adhesive, hard elastomer, hard polymer, and/or glass to optimize the mechanical and optical performance of the multilayer adhesive stack. Soft adhesive layers may be included to optimize lateral decoupling (e.g., during folding and unfolding) of the adhesive stack. Harder layers may be included to provide rigidity and prevent denting during impact events.

Electronic devices with multilayer adhesive

A flexible display in a foldable electronic device may have a display cover layer and display panel that bend around a bend axis. The display panel may have an array of pixels configured to display an image through the display cover layer. The pixels may be formed from thin-film display circuitry that is supported by a flexible display panel substrate. The flexible substrate may be supported by a display support plate that bends about the bend axis. The display may be configured to allow attachment of the display panel substrate to the display support plate while helping to prevent undesired localized deformation of the thin-film display circuitry.

Electronic devices with deformation-resistant displays

To reduce the amount of space occupied in the inactive area of a display by gate driver circuitry, at least a portion of the gate driver circuitry may be positioned in the active area of the display. To accommodate the gate driver circuitry, emissive sub-pixels may be laterally shifted relative to corresponding thin-film transistor sub-pixels. This allows for the thin-film transistor sub-pixels to be grouped adjacent to the central area of the active area, leaving room along an edge of the active area to accommodate one or more additional display components such as gate driver circuitry or fanout portions of data lines.

Displays with gate driver circuitry in an active area

Methods for forming a coating over a surface are disclosed. A method includes directing a first source of barrier film material toward a substrate in a first direction at an angle &#x3b8; relative to the substrate, wherein &#x3b8; is greater than about 0&#xb0; and less than about 85&#xb0;. Additionally, a method of depositing a barrier film over a substrate includes directing a plurality of N sources of barrier film material toward a substrate, each source being directed at an angle &#x3b8;relative to the substrate, wherein for each &#x3b8;, &#x3b8; is greater than about 0&#xb0; and less than about 180&#xb0;. For at least a first of the &#x3b8;, &#x3b8;is greater than about 0&#xb0; and less than about 85&#xb0;, and for at least a second of the &#x3b8;, &#x3b8;is greater than about 95&#xb0; and less than about 180&#xb0;.

Barrier film for electronic devices and substrates

An organic light-emitting diode display may have rounded corners. A negative power supply path may be used to distribute a negative voltage to a cathode layer, while a positive power supply path may be used to distribute a positive power supply voltage to each pixel in the display. The positive power supply path may have a cutout that is occupied by the negative power supply path to decrease resistance of the negative power supply path in a rounded corner of the display. To mitigate reflections caused by the positive power supply path being formed over tightly spaced data lines, the positive power supply path may be omitted in a rounded corner of the display, a shielding layer may be formed over the positive power supply path in the rounded corner, or non-linear gate lines may be formed over the positive power supply path.

Power and data routing structures for organic light-emitting diode displays

Display panel stack-up structures are described. In an embodiment, a display panel includes a substrate, a light source, and a multiple layer thin film encapsulation over the light source. In an embodiment, the display panel additionally includes an anti-reflection layer over the light source. In an embodiment, an incoherence layer is located within the thin film encapsulation.

Incoherent thin film encapsulation for display

An electronic device may have a flexible display such as an organic light-emitting diode display. A strain sensing resistor may be formed on a bent tail portion of the flexible display to gather strain measurements. Resistance measurement circuitry in a display driver integrated circuit may make resistance measurements on the strain sensing resistor and a temperature compensation resistor to measure strain. A crack detection line may be formed from an elongated pair of traces that are coupled at their ends to form a loop. The crack detection line may run along a peripheral edge of the flexible display. Crack detection circuitry may monitor the resistance of the crack detection line to detect cracks. The crack detection circuitry may include switches that adjust the length of the crack detection line and thereby allow resistances to be measured for different segments of the line.

Electronic device display with monitoring circuitry utilizing a crack detection resistor

A display may have rows and columns of pixels that form an active area for displaying images. A display driver integrated circuit may provide multiplexed data signals to demultiplexer circuitry in the display. The demultiplexer circuitry may demultiplex the data signals and provide the demultiplexed data signals to the pixels on data lines. Gate lines may control the loading of the data signals into the pixels. The display may have a length dimension and a width dimension that is shorter than the length dimension. The data lines may extend parallel to the width dimension and the gate lines may extend parallel to the length dimension such that there are more data lines than gate lines in the display. A notch that is free of pixels may extend into the active area. Data lines extending parallel to the width dimension of the display may be routed around the notch.

Electronic devices with narrow display borders

An organic light-emitting diode display may have thin-film transistor circuitry formed on a substrate. The substrate may have rounded corners, a first tail portion along a lower edge, and a second tail portion along an additional edge. A first plurality of signal paths for the display may be routed to the first tail portion and a second plurality of signal paths for the display may be routed to the second tail portion. The second tail portion may be formed within a pixel-free notched region of the substrate. One or more data lines, power supply lines, touch sensor signal lines, and other signal lines may be routed to the second tail portion. Each tail portion of the substrate may be planar or may be bent. Vertical data lines at the edge of the display may be coupled to data line extensions that are routed through the active area of the display.

Signal routing in organic light-emitting diode displays

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Bhadrinarayana Lalgudi Visweswaran