​Samsung Display (pvt), the producer of displays for parent Samsung Electronics’ (005930.KS) foldable products, has been receiving UTG (Ultra thin glass) from Germany’s Schott (pvt), with the material being further processed by a small Korean company, Dowoo Insys (pvt) in which it has a 50%+ stake.  That material replaced a CPI (colorless Polyimide) film supplied by Sumitomo Chemical (4005.JP) used on the first Galaxy Fold which was found to be too easily scratched.  It seems that Samsung Electronics has decided to switch suppliers again, this time developing the FTG (Foldable Thin Glass) at its own manufacturing development center, along with Corning (GLW), a major supplier of display glass to Samsung.
While unconfirmed by the company, it is said that Samsung Electronics used its FTG for the first time as a cover glass for the Galaxy Z Flip 3, with Corning supplying the base material and a well-known Korean glass processor, Econy (pvt) doing the thinning.  The glass is then shipped to a plant in Vietnam where it is cut, coated, and placed on the Fold 3 and potentially other products.  While no word on whether the cover glass for the Galaxy Fold 3 was FTG or the same Schott product used previously, we would expect that Samsung will continue to build out its own internal UTG supply chain for subsequent products.  Given the competitive nature of the smartphone space, Samsung has little choice but to find every possible point at which it can reduce costs, and if it means bypassing a subsidiary, so be it.
CPI producers are hoping that they will be able to gain some traction as rollable devices are developed, as the more extreme cover material curvature in rollables might prove difficult for UTG but also acknowledge that Samsung’s development could have an impact on CPI volumes.  They do note that yields on for UTGs are far lower than for a mature product like CPI, and that if dropped, any glass is prone to breakage.

As part of our understanding of Mini-LED and Micro-LED technology, we have looked at a number of bottlenecks that face the industry as it gears up for rapid expansion over the next few years.  One of the more obvious areas where technology must improve is the transfer process, where LEDs are moved from the wafers on which they are produced and placed on a substrate to form a module.   As Micro-LEDs are still far from real commercialization, we limit the discussion here to Mini-LEDs, a smaller version of what is used in most displays, but larger than Micro-LEDs.
LCD displays are driven by the properties of liquid crystal, a substance that is somewhere between a liquid and a solid.  The molecules in liquid crystal can re-order themselves into a number of shapes and directions called ‘phases’ and by changing the electrical characteristics applied to the LC material, that orientation can be controlled.  But liquid crystal does not produce light, so in LCD displays a backlight must be placed behind the liquid crystal, which then can be used to block or pass the light through the crystal.  As each pixel in an LCD display is made up of three sub-pixels (Red, green, and blue), there is a controlling TFT (Thin-film transistor) circuit behind each sub-pixel, allowing the control of the liquid crystal to be broken down into three segments for each pixel.
Once the backlight passes through each sub-pixel, it goes to a color filter, essentially a sheet covered with red, green and blue dots made of a phosphor.  By using the TFTs to open or close each sub-pixel’s liquid crystal, the color of the combined three sub-pixels can be created.  For example, a pixel of this color 

​would be comprised of the liquid crystal controlling the red sub-pixel being open 71%, the green sub-pixel being open 21%, and the blue sub-pixel open 98%, while this color   

​would be created with the red sub-pixel at 89%, the green sub-pixel at 92%, and the blue sub-pixel at 27%.  With just 100 level gradations 1m colors can be created and with 1,024 levels over 1b are available. 
Sounds good, right?  But there is a problem.  In many LCD displays the light that is needed to be transferred through (or blocked by) the liquid crystal is produced by LEDs and in less expensive displays those LEDs are placed around the edge of a translucent sheet (diffuser) that spreads the light evenly (hopefully) across the sheet.   This is where the problems start however as the characteristics of liquid crystal do not allow it to completely ‘close’, so a pixel that should be black still has some of the backlight shining through, creating at dark gray dot rather than a black one.  Further, in an image where there is a close proximity of a dark section and a bright section, the backlight, which is always on, will spill from the bright pixels into the dark pixels and create what is called ‘bloom’, a halo-like corona around the bright image.

But backlight designers are a resourceful lot and they came up with the idea to move the LEDs from the diffuser edges to behind the diffuser itself, creating what are called direct-lit LCD displays.  In this structure, the light is more uniform across the display but the same problems persist as in edge-lit LCD displays, so designers took things further and created what are known as Full Array Backlights.  While these are similar to Direct-lit backlights, they operate differently.  Rather than having all the LEDs on all the time, Full Array backlight LEDs are grouped into ‘strings’ and ‘zones’.  Strings are a set of LEDs that work as one, meaning they can all be on or off but no individual LED can be different than the others in a string.  Strings can be combined into zones, where a number of strings all work together, say in an area where the image is bright, so the system can be used to keep ‘bloom’ under control by shutting off a string in a zone next to a bright part of the image to reduce the amount of light ‘spill’.  

Under this system, rather than the whole backlight being controlled as a unit, the image is divided into zones and the software breaks down each frame, evaluating the brightness of the zones and adjusting the strings accordingly, but even with many zones and many strings, designers could not achieve the ‘blackness’ that OLED TVs are able to generate, given that each OLED self-emissive sub-pixel can be completely turned off.  Again, not to be outdone by OLED, backlight designers came up with Mini-LED backlighting, a more modern form of Full Array technology.  Instead of grouping the LEDs in strings, each LED in the backlight can be individually controlled, so bleeding issues are reduced further, and the LEDs are smaller, so more can be added to the same space, increasing the display’s ability to light each part of the image as needed.

This concept will increase the viability of LCD displays when compared to OLED displays and will help to extend the life of the vast LCD infrastructure that has been built over the last decade and a half, which is a key reason why LCD panel producers want to promote Mini-LED technology, but there is a catch or more precisely catches. Adding more LEDs means they have to get smaller and smaller LEDs are harder to produce and handle, and the circuitry that is used to drive and control these individual and smaller LEDs gets more complex and more expensive, so there is a production gap between full array backlights and Mini-LEDs until the industry works through ways to reduce the cost of producing Mini-LED backlights.
As Mini-LED backlights can contain many thousands of individually controlled small LEDs typical equipment designed to move a relatively small number of larger LEDs from a wafer to a backplane do not have the speed or accuracy to be cost effective when applied to Mini-LED production.  Typical LED pick and place systems are not able to move these smaller LEDs so new equipment has been developed that can handle these components gently enough and with enough accuracy to make Mini-LEDs cost effective.  One such tool that has been adopted by ‘a major consumer electronics company’ (Apple – AAPL) is produced by Kulicke & Soffa (KLIC)[1] called Pixalux.™ that the company designed jointly with Rohini (pvt). Together they developed a high speed system that ‘punches’ Mini-LEDs from a tape onto a substrate with a mechanical ‘pencil-like’ point.  The speed of the system and the accuracy are better than most modified pick and place systems and the company has been the dominant player in the Mini-LED tool space.
With a top speed of ~75 LEDs/second, populating a Mini-LED backlight with 135,000 Mini-LEDs using the Pixalux tool would take about 30 minutes and the accuracy would be limited to <20um, meaning there would be limitations on LED density, but KLIC has just taken the industry a step further and shipped its next tool for Mini-LED production.  The Luminex™ tool is based on a very different process for transfer, using a laser to heat a double layered tape containing Mini-LEDs.  The heat of the laser creates a bubble in the tape layer on which the Mini-LEDs are attached and pops the Mini-LED off without any physical contact.  This system, which was developed by K&S and a formerly private firm, Uniquarta (pvt), now owned by KLIC, can move up to 1,000 Mini-LEDs/second, at an accuracy of <10um, which would reduce the time to process the same 135,000 Mini-LED array from ~30 minutes to 2.25 minutes, increasing the throughput by over 12 times.
All said, the transfer process is only one step, albeit an important one, in the manufacturing of Mini-LED backlights.  Before they are transferred, the Mini-LED dies have to be created via MOCVD, which is usually done on three separate wafer, one for each color (Blue & green use similar process materials, but red uses different materials).  The die then have to be sorted (performance characteristics) and combined and usually placed on a temporary substrate before being placed on the final array substrate.  These processes are typically done with other tools, however K&S has included the sorting, mixing, and temporary placement steps in the Luminex tool, which has made the new tool not only faster and more accurate, but has reduced the overall cost of ownership across the Mini-LED production line.
Given that it has taken K&S about two years to develop each Mini-LED transfer iteration, they have set a roadmap for the next generation of Mini-LED processing tools that will take the Luminex laser technology and by splitting the beam would be able to transfer at a rate of 10,000 LEDs/second at an accuracy of <1um.  While we don’t expect to see that tool until 2023, it will have applications for both Mini-LEDs and Micro-LEDs, another display technology that is still in the development stage but has the potential to be a significant part of the display space over the next decade.  Of course there are still other bottlenecks that will keep Mini-LED costs non-competitive for a period of time, but with each equipment iteration, the ability of Mini-LED manufacturers to bring costs in line with other display modes increases, and based on even the most conservative estimates, the Mini-LED market is expected to grow rapidly in both units and dollars over the next 4 years.  Hopefully display producers will use those cost savings to bring down premiums on Mini-LED products (see our note from 9/29/21 for details) and enable more cost conscious consumers to avail themselves of the technology.


[1] Please note that we have no financial or business relationship with KLIC.  We speak to the company on occasion and receive no compensation or proprietary information, as is the case with all of our sources.

To learn more about Mini-LED tools:
07/13/21 - http://scmr-llc.com/blog/micro-led-madness
02/12/21 – http://scmr-llc.com/blog/micro-led-primer
02/08/21 – http://scmr-llc.com/blog/klic-buys-uniqarta
​

​DisplayMate is the premier and most respected source for display evaluation and has been evaluating displays since 1991, so a thumbs up for a smartphone display is a very credible positive.  DisplayMate recently evaluated the display for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 13 Pro Max, the top of the line smartphone from Apple this year.  We believe the display was produced by Samsung Display and sets a few records as to performance.
While the display size (6.7”), resolution (1284x2778), and pixels/in (458) remained the same as the iPhone 12, given that the previous display was ‘perfectly sharp for 20/20 vision’, further enhancements to those parameters was unnecessary, however there were some improvements that are noteworthy.  The iPhone 13 Pro Max has a maximum refresh rate (how many times the screen is ‘repainted’ each second) of 120 Hz as opposed to the previous year’s 60 Hz. and adapts to the image content, using the highest rate for full motion high resolution video and a rate as low as 10 Hz for static images.  While the pixels are still updated at the higher rate, the slower screen refresh saves power, a necessary consideration given the display itself can use up to 80% of the total system power draw, so any improvement in power consumption works toward improving time between charges.
The iPhone 13 Pro Max display maximum brightness has also improved from last year’s model, by 27% which when coupled with screen reflectance, which is rated as ‘excellent’, determines the device’s readability in ambient light.  As the iPhone 13 Pro Max has improved both, it is considered one of the best designs for outdoor use.   Among the other performance achievements made on the iPhone 13 ProMax display are:

• Highest Absolute Color Accuracy – “Visually indistinguishable from Perfect”
• Highest Contrast Ratio – “Infinite”
• Lowest Screen Reflectance – 4.6%
• Smallest Brightness Variation with Viewing Angle – 24% at 30⁰

All in an excellent display and an improvement over last year’s model, especially in the areas that count the most to consumers.

There have been a number of mentions in the trade press concerning the slow development of the Mini-LED TV market recently.  Some are based on component availability, meaning LEDs and the Mini-LED modules themselves, and some are speculating that consumers are apprehensive about a new technology that has only been available for a relatively short time and is not quite understood by rank and file TV buyers.  Looking at the component side, much of the consternation over shortages of Mini-LEDs seems to be coming from smaller LED producers and packagers, who are a bit more capital constrained that major LED suppliers such as Ennostar (3714.TT), Sanan (600703.CH), and Nichia (5393.JP) and given the larger numbers and smaller size of Mini-LEDs the cost of production is higher than generic backlight LEDs, but these are all issues that are common to almost every technology upgrade, which Mini-LED backlights certainly are.
In our view there are two obstacles facing the Mini-LED market, more specifically the Mini-LED TV market, and all are related to price.  Not as much the price of the Mini-LEDs themselves, or the backlight arrays, but the price of the TV sets in which they are used.  The price of Mini-LEDs will decline as competition from China increases, particularly from BOE (200725.CH), who has already staked a claim in the Mini-LED backlight module market by shifting to glass rather than PCB substrates for its commercial Mini-LED modules, which is an aggressive step forward in the development of the Mini-LED modules, but a necessary one if the market is to grow.
The bigger problems is Mini-TV set pricing itself which not only must absorb the higher cost of the Mini-LED backlight modules, but the advertising, development costs associated with Mini-LED modules, require larger driver and timing circuitry, and most importantly the TV brand’s desire to generate higher margins than those from generic LED backlit sets.  In order to better understand Mini-LED TV pricing we have put together a table identifying 42 Mini-LED TV models, 37 of which are models announced or released this year.  We have excluded any models that are no longer available, although we note that some models, particularly from Chinese brands, are not available in the US.  The database looks at over 15 comparative features, although in the table below we leave out many such features that do not have to do with the physical aspects of the TVs themselves, such as which streaming services they support or sound systems.  The abbreviated table below shows a subset of our data, and we note that TCL (000100.CH), the first TV brand to release a Mini-LED TV (2019), still makes available previous year models which we have included.  All other brands and models are from this year.
That said, here is what the data indicates.  The lowest priced Mini-LED set is the 55” TCL 4K (Model 55R646), which sells for $950.  This compares with Samsung’s (005930.KS) two 55” sets (QE55QN90A & QE55QN85A) which sell for $1,550 and $1,400 respectively.  Samsung does produce a 43” model (QE43QN90A) that sells for $1,300 but is currently in very limited production.  The most expensive Mini-LED sets on an absolute basis are the Skyworth (751.HK) 86” 4K Q72 at $7,744 and the Xiaomi (1810.HK) 82” Extreme, which also sells for the same price.  However when we look at the sets compared against the price/in2 of screen space, Xiaomi is both the winner and loser, with the abovementioned ‘Extreme’ 8K being the most expensive at $2.70/in2 while their 82” 4K ‘Master’ set is the lowest at $0.54/in2.  With the Xiaomi sets to be made available next month, we expect the price of the ‘Extreme’ might see some revisions, but for those brands that have few offerings, the number of units sold will be almost irrelevant.  The real battle here is between Samsung, LG (066570.KS), and TCL, with Samsung setting the pace with 16 models, LG with 6 and TCL with 5 (2021).  Looking at the two TV sizes that are common to all three brands, TCL is again the lowest cost/in2 for both while Samsung and LG are almost identical.
We note as always that much of the competition between brands is feature based and that goes to a new level with Mini-LED TVs, with the number of Mini-LED ‘zones’ and the absolute number of Mini-LEDs the new battleground.  Not all brands give out this information, sometimes because they don’t compare well or they don’t want to reveal such competitive information, but while the absolute number of Mini-LEDs is important to the set’s ability to reduce backlighting issues such as ‘bloom’[1], there are many other factors that can contribute to how well images look on Mini-LED LCD TVs.  All in, the growth of the Mini-LED segment will be driven by how quickly component costs can decline, and how willing brands are to ‘seed’ the market with more realistic premiums.  Consumers need to be incentivized to explore the benefits of  Mini-LED TVs and those brands that are willing to offer sets at more realistic premiums will win the battle.  Given that this is really the first year that there has been a more than one brand offering such TVs, while the press calls this year ‘the year of Mini-LEDs’, we believe the first year when competition really begins will be 2022.


[1] ‘Bloom’ – When LEDs in light areas leak into dark areas.

Relationships in the display business are strange animals and the give and take between customers and producers is a tightrope walk that would give the Wallenda’s pause.  Panel producers must evaluate the cost of modifications to existing lines in light of the volumes and lifetimes of customer projects, and an over or under estimation on either the customer or producer side can result in an extended period of poor profitability.  Apple and Samsung Display (pvt) have such a love/hate relationship, with Apple always looking to broaden its display supplier list, while SDC advances its technology quickly enough to maintain a lead over its competitors and ingratiate itself with Apple.
Apple and SDC have a number of development projects, one of which is to develop a 10.86” OLED iPad for release next year.  However recent information out of Korea has indicated that the project has been cancelled due to a technology conflict between the two.  Samsung’s typical OLED structure is a single RGB stack, while Apple is convinced that such an arrangement would not produce a bright enough display.  They propose a double stack structure that is essentially two sets of OLED materials on top of each other, with Apple’s contention that the single stack structure would not be bright enough, a relatively common complaint about OLED displays, and that it would extend the display’s lifetime given the use profile for tablets.
SDC seems to have been convinced that such a product, and the changes it would have to make to its production line, would not be profitable for SDC based on its cost estimates and the expectations for potential panel sales to Apple.  Further Apple is expecting to produce two different OLED iPads, one with LTPS backplanes and one with LTPO, which would mean that SDC would have to change processes on both the OLED line (single stack to double stack) and on the backplane line where it would have to either dedicate one line to LTPS and one to LTPO or switch during production.  Based on the cost analysis for such a product and the yield SDC has been able to get on the production of 10.86” OLED panels, it looks like the project has been cancelled.
Whether this means that Apple will wait an additional year or two until LG Display (LPL) is able to bring production levels up to meet Apple’s goals is an open question. LG Display uses a two stack structure for its automotive OLED displays but has only low volume capabilities currently.  If LGD is willing to expand capacity for IT panels using a tandem structure, there is the possibility that Apple might see a way to release two OLED iPads in 2023, but LGD has to make the same profitability calculations that SDC has made and while they might be more adept at the tandem OLED structure than SDC, they would have to get some more substantial reassurances (such as expansion financing) from Apple before they go further…

The trade press in Korea is reporting that the CEO of Samsung’s mobile division visited the US twice earlier this year to negotiate with chip suppliers to increase the volumes of application processors allocated to Samsung mobile products.  Tae-moon Roh visited ‘a global application processor maker’, likely Qualcomm (QCOM) but was unable to secure a commitment to increase volumes as the supplier was unable to increase production and was honoring commitments made to other CE companies.  Roh was said to be so upset over his inability to increase Samsung’s allocation that he left a senior VP behind in the US, ordering them to return only once the issue was resolved.  The VP was said to remain in the US for another 3 months.
This unusual circumstance, where Samsung is refused such a request, is indicative of how tight the AP market has been, but is also a result of Samsung’s increasing reliance on ODMs in China for the design and assembly of some of the lower priced Samsung smartphones, a system developed by Roh when he took the Mobile reins in January 2020.  By outsourcing ~20% of the mobile division’s production, Samsung itself has become a smaller component buyer and therefore has less influence over suppliers as the OEMs can opt for different component suppliers than would be the case for Samsung flagship phones.
While we believe the decision to outsource some of Samsung’s mobile device design in order for the company to stay competitive against Chinese brands, the timing was unfortunate.  COVID-19 has disrupted many aspects of the mobile supply chain and continues to do so at a time when Samsung is trying to make a transition from declining flagship sales (Galaxy S series and Galaxy Note) to Galaxy foldables, where Samsung has a clear advantage over other brands.  Not only has overall smartphone demand been weak, but the gap in sales between the older flagship legacy products and the new foldables is still large, and while prices for foldables are falling below $1,000, consumers are still a bit hesitant to buy into the foldable story.  With foldables representing less than 3% of Samsung’s smartphone shipments this year we would have to call this a ‘gap year’ for Samsung’s mobile division.

The three mobile carriers in South Korea have worked together to complete the construction of a mmWave wireless 5G network in the subway.  Don’t get excited, we are not talking about the possibility of adding mmWave 5G to the 4/5 or the 1/2/3 in New York City, but a small segment of the Seoul, South Korea Subway line #2.  The network will give users Wi-Fi service that is ~10 times faster than the current 4G network, which averages download speeds around 71Mbps, with expectations that the system can be further optimized to provide download speed up to 1 Gbps.
The system has 26 base stations installed next to the track bed, 10 receivers which are mounted on the trains, and 20 Wi-Fi 6E routers in the passenger cars.  The receivers capture the signals from the base stations and convert it to Wi-Fi which is transmitted to the Wi-Fi routers in each passenger car via optical cable.  The track 5G signal is not accessible to 5G smartphones but only to those on the Wi-Fi network.
What makes this a bit unusual is that there has been considerable controversy over the use of mmWave frequencies in South Korea, with the government in 2020 said to be downplaying mmWave in lieu of low and mid-band 5G, which has a slower speed but a longer transmit range and therefore a less expensive buildout. The subway system, which is scheduled to begin next month, has been spearheaded by the Ministry of Science who coordinated the necessary cooperation between the country’s three major carriers.
 While the system in Seoul is a test bed, we would be happy to get a consistent 5G mobile signal for more than a few minutes anywhere in the US, and that would be at much slower sub6 frequency bands, but the bigger question would be do we really need mmWave 5G on the subway?  Looking at the collection of subway denizens below (just the tip of the iceberg), the necessity to livestream such content to Instagram (FB) followers seems a bit less than necessary…

​The FCC announced that it will begin accepting petitions for the “Secure & Trusted Communications Network Reimbursement Program” that is designed to reimburse “Advance Communications Service Providers”  who have been using Huawei (pvt), ZTE (000063.CH), Hytera (002583.CH), Hikvision (002415.CH) or Dahua (002236.CH) equipment that was purchased on or before June 30, 2020.  The later names include security cameras.  This part of the program is for those carriers that have 10 million or fewer customers.  The filing window opens on October 29 and closes on January 14, 2022 with the FCC releasing a public notice on those applications that have been accepted before March 31, 2022, although that date can be extended for an additional 45 days.  In 2Q 2022 the FCC will issue funding allocations and will begin accepting invoices for actual cost claims later in 2Q ’22.
The program requires considerable verification of the equipment to be replaced and all removal work must be done by 3rd party providers so verification can be made, but the FCC will only consider replacement costs to be reasonable if they compare to what the provider incurred to install the original equipment., although the substitution of new 5G equipment for replaced 4G equipment is considered valid.  The FCC provides a cost estimate ‘guide’, although individual applicants can document expected costs more specifically if they vary from the guidelines, however the total funding allocation for the program is capped at $1.9b currently.

​In early March Visionox (002387.CH) indicated that the company was notified by its largest shareholder, Tibet Zhihe Capital Management (pvt) that it would be transferring its shares to Visionox’s 2nd largest shareholder, the Kunshan Economic & Technological Development Zone, a city run management company that administers the special economic zone in Kunshan.  At the time the Chinese trade press (in usual fashion) spun the transaction, which moves control of the company to a state-owned entity, as a positive event that brings together ‘the resources of Hefei and Kunshan…to further increase the production capacity and market share…leading to a win-win situation and the state-owned institutions.’  
That transaction, which has been questioned by shareholders due to a potentially discounted transaction price, has been progressing at a snail’s pace, especially given the relatively poor performance Visionox shares have shown since the announcement (down from 11.52 RMB at the beginning of the year to 8.65 RMB currently and the increased state ownership that the transfer would accomplish.  It seems now that Visionox has put the transaction on hold ‘based on general market conditions’, although the announcement seems to have made little difference to the stock or shareholders.  While Visionox has a number of consequential OLED customers, they have been vague about the utilization rates at their three production fabs, using ‘ramping’ rather than specifics to answer capacity questions, but it is still a toss up as to whether the deal postponement is a positive or a negative.
From the glass half full perspective, one could make the case that the company is doing well enough they no longer see the need for help form local or provincial governments, and from the glass half empty perspective, the company’s performance and prospects are not strong enough to warrant any further investment by the state.  When 3Q results are released we expect it will be easier to see which is the case.

Your doctor told you that you need to get more exercise so you bought yourself a smartwatch that tells you how many steps you have taken each day and all sorts of other information that can either incentivize you to take better care of yourself, or scare you into seeing your doctor more often.  There is one problem with smartwatches and that is the battery, as the more you use the functions that the watch provides, the shorter the battery life and the more often you have to recharge.  A good smartwatch is likely going to advertise that it can last ‘days’ before it needs a charge, but again that depends on what apps are running and how often you access the information or connected sites. 
With average use a decent smartwatch like the Samsung (005930.KS) Galaxy Watch 4 should last two days on a charge, but using the watch during an hour at the gym, keeping notifications on, and tracking your sleep will bring that down to an hour or two over 1 day.  Even with fast charging that means over an hour when your watch is charging, and if you have an early magnetic charger model, which will likely fall off at least once during the charge, it could take many hours, which defeats the purpose of a watch that is also a body function tracker.
Samsung seems to have approached the battery life problem a little differently in a recently published US patent Office application that charges a smartwatch battery via solar cells built into a polymer device called a “Luminescent Solar Concentrator” that is part of the watch wristband.  The problem with using solar cells to charge anything is they need to be as close as possible to the direction of the light source (“incident to”) to produce enough energy to make a difference.  While stationary solar cells can be positioned to receive as much direct light as possible, a smartwatch is going to be moving at almost all times and will never be in the best position to produce power. 
This is where the LSC comes it as it is a polymer containing quantum dots with solar cells attached on the sides and bottom.  Light entering the top will be coming from a number of different angles, with only some of the light incident to the solar cells.  The quantum dots will absorb the light that is not incident to the solar cells and re-emit the light in a direction that is incident to the solar cells, therefore capturing light that might have been too weak to power the cells.  Taking it a bit further, the solar cells can be designed to be sensitive to a particular frequency of light (color) so one cell could be sensitive to warm (yellow) light while another cold (blue) light, allowing the watch to be charged under almost any lighting circumstances.
As always with patents, there is no guarantee that the technology in the patent will ever be used commercially, however the idea in a lesser form (no quantum dots) with little success.  Perhaps this new iteration might reduce the need to charge as often and make smartwatches not only helpful but also ‘green’.  We will keep an eye open for any hints toward the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 due out next May.