LG Display, the designer and manufacturer of the OLED panels found at the heart of many of today’s OLED TVs and monitors, has today announced that it’s successfully developed a new way of manufacturing OLED panels that removes the fine metal mask process used in conventional OLED panel creation – removing with it the numerous issues and limitations associated with the FMM approach.
Tested in identical conditions, for instance, LG Display’s new, very uncatchily named FMM-Less innovative Pixel Patterning panels increase brightness by 1.6 times over any FMM design. They’re also claimed to extend panel lifetime by a massive 2.4 times, while reducing power consumption by as much as 13%. All of which is made possible by the fact that the FLiPP approach improves the aperture ratio — the proportion of the total display area occupied by RGB pixels – by around 55%.
As if all these startling facts and figures weren’t already reason enough to get excited about FLiPP panels, LG Display says they’re also more affordable to manufacture since there’s no need to produce expensive new FMMs every time the panel size or resolution being manufactured changes. There’s a raw physical advantage to the FLiPP approach, too, since traditional large fine metal masks are prone to sagging in the middle under their own weight, potentially causing sub-pixel misalignments that can result in color-mixing defects.
The traditional FMM process additionally requires OLED panels to be created from larger mother glass substrates, such as 8.6th or other 8th-generation substrates (2200 x 2500mm), which have to be divided and processed as half-cut substrates due to the limited size of FMM sticks.
The FLiPP panels (which are the result of 12 months of concentrated R&D) also differ from FMM panels by coating RGB pixels in order, securing them in precise positions and incorporating photolithography (UV light etching) to erase unnecessary areas during OLED pixel patterning. Compared with this new approach, claims LG Display, the FMM approach is essentially only a stencil art technique where red, green and blue organic materials are evaporated trough tiny holes in the FMM design’s metal plates.
The FLiPP panels are well past the laboratory experiment stage, too. LG Display has already deployed its existing Tandem WOLED production infrastructure and tech expertise to ensure that it’s become the first display company to manufacture FMM-free OLED panels using 8.5th-gen mother glass in a single, whole piece. In the process of achieving this, LG Display has found that it can produce OLED laptop panels of the same size with up to 64% more mother glass usage efficiency than FMM or FMM-less methods that require divided substitutes. And where’s less waste and higher productivity, of course, there are also potentially lower manufacturing costs.
Arguably FLiPP’s single biggest manufacturing advantage, though, is that it suffers with essentially no panel size or resolution constraints. You could theoretically produce FLiPP displays from as little as one inch right up to 100 inches – as well as potentially using them in VR and AR displays as well as monitors and TVs, making it a pretty much universal OLED technology.
LG Display intends to use FLiPP panels in IT applications such as tablets and monitors first, before expanding it into everything from one-inch wearable devices to king-sized TVs.
“We were able to successfully realize FLiPP, a next-generation OLED patterning technology referred to as a ‘dream technology,’ by bringing together our proprietary WOLED technologies and know-how,” says Choi Young-seok, CTO at LG Display.
If you’re keen to see FLiPP technology in action and you happen to be in Busan between now and August 21, the tech is on show on LG’s stand at the current International Meeting on Information Display (IMID) 2026 show. I’ll also hope to spot it at the upcoming IFA show in Berlin, and/or CES 2027 in Las Vegas in January.
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