Following years of aggressive investments, Samsung Display is all but ready to commercialize quantum dot nanorod (QNED) technologies on a massive scale, industry analysts at UBI Research report. That claim is based on their analysis of nearly 100 new display patents Samsung secured over the course of this year. More specifically, it would appear the company made some extraordinary progress in the segment over the last several months.
With that said, a lot will reportedly ride on Samsung's ability to hit acceptable yield rates, as is the case with mass applications of any new tech across all consumer electronics. In the long term, however, QNED has the potential to be even cheaper than existing OLED manufacturing techniques once the economies of scale effects are factored in.
QD-OLED vs. QNED tech
Our readers may not need any special introductions to quantum dot technology as Samsung has been betting enormous sums of its R&D resources on QD-OLEDs being the immediate future of television for some time now. In this context, that “immediate future” label essentially means “LCD successors.” At the same time, the company is already looking toward the long term and has identified a likely successor to the nascent QD-OLED segment – QNED, short for Quantum dot Nanorod LED.
For added clarity, the main difference between QNED and QD-OLED panel tech is that the former entails spraying nanorod LEDs onto a given pixel area using cutting-edge inkjet printers, then using electric signals to fine-tune, i.e. align the said solution with individual pixels. QD-OLEDs, meanwhile, use blue OLED materials as the exclusive basis for creating each pixel (instead of combining blue and yellow ones like a typical OLED standard). They divide those into blue subpixels, red subpixels, and the original blue category. The most important results of this process are even more accurate colors and almost impeccable transformation efficiency resulting in brighter panels.
