What is AMOLED display?

As the smartphone industry is progressing exponentially, gone are the days when the only major purpose of a display in a mobile device was to show the contact name or the number of the person calling. But, as time passed by more and more features were added to help that allowed us to view emails, click and record photos and videos, etc. Nowadays, a smartphone’s display has become one of the most important aspects to consider as it’s the part you’ll spend the most time directly interacting with. While the smartphone industry revolved around various display technologies such as IPS, LCD, LED, Retina, AMOLED, to describe how your viewing experience would be on your smartphone screen viz. Here we will talk about AMOLED display which is found majorly in all the smartphones nowadays.

But, before understanding the AMOLED display, lets first take a look at how the OLED display works.

OLED display

Organic Light Emitting Diode abbreviated as OLED is a technology wherein the emissive electroluminescent layer is composed of a thin-film organic compound which emits lights when an electric current is passed. In this technology, a layer of organic material (carbon-based) is sandwiched between two conducting sheets (an anode and a cathode). And when an electric current is passed to the two conducting sheets, the electro-luminescent light is produced directly from the organic material sandwiched between. OLED displays can use either passive-matrix (PMOLED) or active-matrix techniques. Active-matrix OLEDs (AMOLED) need a thin-film transistor backplane to switch each pixel on or off. What’s interesting to note here is that an OLED display works without requiring a backlight, which means it can show strong black levels and is thinner and lighter than a liquid crystal display (LCD).

AMOLED display

While an OLED display requires a thin-film transistor backplane to switch each pixel, an AMOLED display sports an active matrix of OLED pixels to produce light (luminescence) when an electric current is passed which has been incorporated in a thin-film-transistor (TFT) array, which functions as a series of switches to control the current flowing to each individual pixel. Each pixel in the AMOLED display is composed of red, green and blue subpixels that turn on/off in combination to create a wide color gamut. Two TFT backplane technologies, viz. polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) and amorphous silicon (a-Si), are widely used today in AMOLED displays. Another advantage of AMOLED displays is that they are capable to deliver high refresh rates at the same time consumes less power which makes this tech convenient for portable electronics such as smartphones where power consumption is crucial.

Another advantage of AMOLED screens is that they have brilliant color reproduction, high brightness levels, and great contrast ratio.