OLED-TV Display/Monitor Technology News

Samsung recognized the potential of Clairvoyante’s PenTile technology to improve display performance more than seven years ago when we became the first company to license the IP,” said Seung-Ho Ahn, VP of Samsung’s external affairs and IP group, in a statement today. “This new business relationship will afford us the opportunity to guide this technology in support of a wide range of markets and applications.

The move sees Samsung gain Clairvoyante’s PenTile technology, which the company described as offering a significant reduction in power consumption for high-resolution mobile LCDs and for extending the lifetime of high-resolution mobile OLED displays.

The human eye perceives the resolution of the PenTile RGBW™ panel as the same as an equivalent RGB stripe panel, yet the PenTile® panel uses one-third fewer subpixels. Consider the figure below to understand how this is accomplished.

At the top is the PenTile RGBW™ layout; at the bottom RGB stripe. The circle at the bottom center demonstrates the finest pattern of vertical black and white lines an RGB stripe display is capable of rendering. This requires three columns (R + G + B) be turned "on" and an equivalent width of three columns be turned "off" to write one cycle of a black and white line. From a suitable distance this collection of color subpixels appears to the eye as a white line.

The top center circle shows the equivalent pattern of vertical black and white lines written to the PenTile RGBW™ layout. From a distance the array of color subpixels in two columns will appear to the eye as a white line, identical to that generated by the RGB stripe layout, and the following two columns will write the corresponding black line. With only four columns being used to accomplish the same linear cycle that required six columns for legacy RGB stripe, two columns are saved. Hence, PenTile RGBW™ technology maintains the same resolution with one-third fewer columns, one-third fewer subpixels and one-third fewer transistors in the array. This results in wider columns and improved aperture ratio (ratio of transmissive area of a subpixel to the total area of that subpixel).

The circles on the right of the figure demonstrate the finest pattern of black and white lines which may be written horizontally to RGB stripe (bottom) and PenTile RGBW™ (top). Note that both layouts require the same number of rows for horizontal lines.