Samsung Display Company today revealed new display technology that features a remarkable power-saving function for mobile electronics, being commercialized for the first time in Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G flagship smartphones.

The display company has now successfully commercialized its low-power OLED adaptive frequency™ technology, which can curtail the operating power of a phone’s display by as much as 22 percent over existing smartphones now in general use.

“High-definition video streaming and gaming are expanding their capabilities in line with 5G commercialization, creating a widespread need for display panel technologies that can enable greater power savings,” said Ho-Jung Lee, Vice President of the mobile display product planning team for Samsung Display.

“Our Adaptive Frequency™ display technology is expected to considerably enhance the user experience by calibrating refresh rates in line with the requirements of a specific application and therein more precisely allocating available power. This will free up time for other smartphone operations,” Lee added.

The company’s power-saving technology allows the display panel to utilize variable refresh rates that consume the least possible amount of power for each type of application. The adaptive frequency™ technology supports a 120Hz scan rate for playing mobile games that require speedy frame changes, a 60Hz rate for movie streaming, a 30Hz rate for email correspondence, and a 10Hz rate for viewing still images or browsing social networking services.

Existing smartphone panels offer only a fixed refresh rate. They cannot automatically calibrate a phone’s refresh rate, which would result in image flickering caused by luminance differences at lower refresh rates. Samsung Display’s new backplane** technology eliminates flickering for operating frequencies as low as 10Hz.

In particular, when displaying still images, the new variable-rate panel has proven to save 60 percent of operating power by introducing a low-frequency refresh rate of 10Hz, while conventional panels unnecessarily waste power through the use of a consistent, fixed frequency regardless of the type of content.

The world-leading display company also anticipates employing this cutting-edge, power-saving technology with other advanced IT products in the future, to help boost material efficiency and optimize the functionality of operating components.

* Refresh (or Scan) Rate: The number of frames that a display panel delivers in one second. For example, a 120Hz refresh rate accounts for 120 frame changes. Higher scan rates result in more lively and natural-appearing images.
** Backplane Technology: Making substrates such as glass and polyimide (PI) that are comprised of thin-film transistors (TFTs) required to operate pixels, the minimum unit comprising most display panels.