Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial are to begin manufacturing next-generation displays for use in mobile phones and devices, at their joint plant by the second half of 2009.

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co, the Japanese electronics makers’ joint venture set up in 2002, plans to invest about 15 billion yen ($140 million US Dollars) to make small and medium-size organic light-emitting diode, or OLED displays.

OLEDs use light-emitting organic compounds similar to those found in fireflies. TVs using OLED panels don’t require a backlight, and can be made thinner than those based on liquid crystal or plasma displays.

Company spokesman, Toshiyuki Yoshida, said that the investment is in anticipation of a move to the new technology from the now more common liquid crystal displays. He added that the investment was an estimate, and stressed that the details had not yet been decided.

A collaboration between Universal Display Corporation and LG Display has resulted in the development of flexible, full-colour active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display prototype.

The four-inch diagonal, QVGA full-colour AMOLED display prototype combines LGD’s amorphous-Silicon backplane technologies with Universal Display’s OLED front plane technologies, including its high-efficiency Universal PHOLED and transparent compound cathode TOLED technologies.

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