LG Display faced an emergency ahead of mass production of new organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel products scheduled to be supplied to a client in 2024. The client’s request came in urgently, and nearly a month was needed to prepare from design to mass production, but there was no leeway to meet the requested timeline. If the schedule were delayed, idle facilities and other factors were expected to lead to cost losses in the range of several KRW hundred billion.

LG Display concluded that it would be impossible to resolve the issue using its existing methods and decided to utilize its virtual development solution “VDE.” Instead of conducting direct experiments in physical space, the company verifies in a virtual space whether the product is implemented correctly and operates without defects. Using VDE to validate the product, LG Display resolved the issue within a week.

LG Display has been actively using the VDE solution on site since 2024. Specifically, it is applied in areas such as device, panel design, and process engineering. As use cases accumulate in these business units, related data have been built up. The company has recently begun to advance the system by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), and VDE is now establishing itself as LG Display’s “problem solver.”

Utilizing VDE in production sites can reduce trial and error in the development process. “Recently, by using VDE, efficiency has improved to the point where only about half the number of experiments previously required for development verification are now needed,” said Kim Han-hee, who is in charge of VDE at LG Display, in an interview at LG Science Park in Magok-dong, Gangseo-gu, Seoul. “By saving on experiment costs and shortening time, it is contributing to enabling each business unit to mass-produce products within the scheduled period,” Kim added. LG Science Park is an R&D complex where about 20,000 researchers from major LG Group affiliates are based.

When a specific product is developed on site, a hypothesis is established, a model is created, and then verification begins. Previously, 10 experiments might have been required for verification, but after the introduction of VDE, verification can be completed with only 5 or 6 experiments. Kim added, “In some cases, VDE captures aspects that humans might miss when conducting experiments directly, allowing us to gain unexpected insights through technological advancement.”

LG Display has recently been further advancing VDE by integrating AI. While simulations are processed using high-performance computing, human experts such as engineers still need to be involved in entering the variables required for experiments and analyzing the results. The company aims to increase efficiency by applying AI to these tasks. AI has already been introduced for classification and analysis of results. It is also reviewing ways to utilize AI for variable input tasks going forward.

“Ultimately, the goal is to advance VDE to a level where it is trusted as much as physical experiments,” Kim said. “When the two experiments conflict, it is common to prioritize on-site physical experiments, but because there is the possibility of ‘human error’ in human judgment, physical experiments cannot be considered perfect,” Kim explained. “The goal is to build trust to the extent that, in such cases, people could consider that the human, not VDE, might be wrong.”

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