Last year he was awarded the coveted Wolf Prize in chemistry.  I have to wonder if he ever imagined the impact his idea would have 30 years later.  Together with his colleague,  Steven Van Slyke, many patents were awarded for this technology.

Professor Ching Tang from Democrat and Chronicle

AMOLEDs have lifetime that is related to the current density used to drive the OLED material.  This is especially true for blue since blue has the lowest brightness for a given amount of current.  The other way to say this is that blue OLED material has lower luminous efficiency.  To maintain the same brightness with blue, OLED display designers have to drive it with more current per unit area.

So how does PenTile technology help Samsung to extend lifetime for high resolution panels?

This comes from the ability to use 2/3s the number of subpixels in PenTile OLED (Super AMOLED)  relative to RGB stripe OLED (Super AMOLED Plus).  Thanks to PenTile technology’s use of subpixels rendering it is possible to have the same number of pixels as the equivalent RGB stripe.  With only 2/3s the subpixels, one can make the ratio of driven subpixel area larger with a smaller overall percentage of space in between subpixels (better fill factor), as compared to RGB stripe – which is what gives rise to the improvement in current density for a given brightness,  which in turn leads to better lifetime.

For lower pixel pitch, such as was used in the Galaxy S Plus, the current density was relatively low due to the coarser pixel pitch so the lifetime was fine.  But, at the pixel density of the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S III, PenTile is the way to go, at least until sometime in the future when significant strides are made in blue OLED material luminous efficiency.  As I have said before, PenTile is an enabler that make high resolution OLED practical for the product brightness and lifetimes specs that we all have come to demand.   This is why you have never seen any production OLED  of greater than 250 dpi without a PenTile configuration.  If the demand for ever increasing pixel pitch continues, PenTile will still be key even if blue luminous efficiency sees some level of enhancement.

Samsung Galaxy S3

At long last the long awaited Galaxy SIII smartphone has emerged and the blogs such as Android Community  http://bit.ly/K5t9Rz are describing the unboxing.  Despite the many speculations about Samsung abandoning PenTile for this 720P OLED display  http://bit.ly/JFb79Z , it is now apparent that this didn’t happen.   http://engt.co/IpwdXs  Samsung has not abandoned PenTile and still counts on PenTile for such high resolution OLED displays such as the Galaxy S3 with a 306 PPI layout.

When bloggers refer to PenTile Super AMOLED as being cheaper, I have to ask them, “Cheaper than what?”  Show me a comparable, high resolution RGB stripe AMOLED display to compare this to.  If there is no such displays any discussion of relative cost is meaningless.  PenTile technology remains an enabler for high resolution OLED applications, not a cost reducer.  And, as long as the demand for ever increasing resolution continues you will see many more such PenTile OLED designs.

Increasingly I am seeing blogs that ask what is wrong with PenTile anyway.  Despite the vocal critics, at a pixel pitch in the range of 300ppi+  PenTile technology is a great fit for these applications.

http://bit.ly/HrspZI

This author, who never specifically noted that this displays was PenTile technology,  commented:

“…But we have no issues with the crispness and the brightness of the display as it works well with 640 x 480 …”

It comes down to looking at PenTile displays for yourself and not being misled by any negative blogs or claims of fuzzy text.

Samsung Galaxy Note Superbowl Ad

With all of the focus on the Superbowl and the Superbowl ads it was gratifying to see two ads for PenTile equipped products in a single Superbowl.  One was for the Galaxy Note with a 5.3-inch diagonal 800 x 1280 format PenTile OLED display http://bit.ly/yW5brS  The other ad was for the Motorola RAZR with a 4.3-inch qHD format PenTile OLED display. http://huff.to/wqqHYr

By my count today PenTile has shown up in 118 products to date.

Ms. Brown Elliott will also be speaking in Northern California, at Stanford University on the 28th of February on the topic of “Reducing Field Sequential Color Break-Up Artifacts using a Hybrid Display with Locally Desaturated Virtual Primaries”.  This talk will cover the development of the PenTile Hybrid Multi-Primary Field Sequential Color display that was demonstrated by Samsung in their DisplayWeek 2011 booth last May in Los Angeles.  For more information regarding attending the talk, visit the Stanford Center for Image Systems Engineering website:  http://scien.stanford.edu/

http://www.oled-info.com/lg-55em9600

The purpose of this was ostensibly to facilitate the manufacturing of a large diagonal OLED, that is traditionally difficult with shadow mask deposition techniques.  My assumption is that they used RGBW to enhance brightness, taking advantage of their white OLED material to attain the longer 30,000 hours or more of  lifetime which is now expected for TVs.  At CES I was told that the layout was a QUAD layout, which uses 4 subpixels per pixel, unlike PenTile that uses, on average, 2 subpixels per pixel achieved through subpixel rendering.

Similarly, we are also seeing additional announcements of products by Sony using their Sony Whitemagic™ technology.

http://news.in.msn.com/technology/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5762843

The layout of RGBW for Whitemagic also has used 4 subpixels per pixel unlike PenTile’s 2 subpixels per pixel on average.  While Sony’s stated purpose for Whitemagic has been to enhance power efficiency, a 4 subpixel per pixel layout only take advantage of the improved light throughput of clear subpixels.  It is, no doubt, an improvement to power efficiency, but it forgoes the chance to improve aperture ratio, which a significant part of what is achieved with PenTile technology.  As one moves to increasingly higher resolution formats aperture ratio becomes a major limitation, even for low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) backplanes.  For PenTile, however, the contribution of improved efficiency in our highest resolution designs is equally attributable to improvements in aperture ratio as well as the improved throughput gained from clear color filters.

Competitive RGBW is a step in the right direction, but there is no substitute for genuine PenTile technology.

Ron Amadeo of Android Police said:

…First off, forget all that technical Pentile stuff. I want to hate Pentile, I really do, but the screen is just gorgeous. I’m normally the type to complain about Pentile’s checkerboard layout, but the pixels are so tiny I just can’t see it. No one else notices it either, everyone that sees the phone marvels at how good it looks…

http://bit.ly/u0b8Id

Hubert Nguyen of Ubergizmo

Ferris2375:   I’ve had numerous phones, GS2, iPhone 4…this is the best screen I’ve seen yet.

LaGgY_42o:  Its crazy good, by far the best screen on any device I’ve ever seen, blacks are so black u can’t tell where the phone ends and the screen begins without looking really close. Also u can load up pretty much any page in portrait view with far away zoom and STILL read the really really fine text just fine.

http://bit.ly/u1YPXG

Some have noticed some artifacts at brightness settings of less than 40% described as vertical banding.  Others have complained about yellowish displays.  Such yellowish characteristic apparently is not appearing in every Galaxy Nexus.

B1ck132 http://bit.ly/t2m8fd

I have 2 Gnexes and all i can say is that the screen is great and the screen is bad.
How?
Well basically one of them have a yellowish screen like most reviewers talked about.
The other though has clear whites, nearly as clear as iPhone screen, which is by far has the best whites on a phone screen.
The one with the yellow tint is useable and still is a good screen but its not great or anything.
The other one though is the best screen I’ve ever used.
So keep in mind that your experinces about the screen might vary depending on your device. As far as i can tell this is actually a known issue with AMOLED screens.

While I am not going to speculate on the cause for such banding or yellowish colors, some bloggers have correctly pointed out that these are not PenTile related artifacts.  Nothing about PenTile varies between displays.  Nor is there any aspect of the algorithms that is configured in bands.

Still one other dot counter, Flanimal felt that an HD 720 PenTile display was a waste of compute power. http://bit.ly/t2m8fd

…The GPU has to do the work for the full 1280×720 resolution, yet not all of this work is converyed on the display…

This commenter still cannot accept the fact that there are as many pixels in this display as there are in an RGB stripe, despite fewer subpixels.  Another way of saying this is that there are as many luminance centers here as for the equivalent RGB stripe.  While there is reduction in density of red and blue chrominance centers, these are still in excess of the density that can be seen in the human vision system.  For PenTile displays the reduction in the computation better matches what we see.  If anybody doubts that we have 720 HD worth of data, you should compare the Galaxy Nexus with a screen full of data to the iPhone 4GS with the identical number of subpixels and quickly prove to yourself that the Galaxy Nexus is capable of displaying much more information.

As it turns out, the Nexus Prime with PenTile Super AMOLED Advanced has exactly the same number of subpixels as the iPhone 4S  (1,843,200), but it displays 1280 x 720 pixels rather than the 960 x 640 of the iPhone 4.  Because of the larger screen size, the pixel pitch of the Nexus Prime is 316 ppi compared to the slightly higher iPhone 4S  pixel pitch of 326 ppi.  A key difference will be that the Nexus Prime will show 50% more information.  Viewed from the distance where you can just see both displays, corner-to-corner, ask yourself which of these two displays makes better use of 1,843,200 dots.