[FlexiGO’s Folding Test Equipment Wins the Equipment Category of the IMID 2026 ‘Display of the Year Awards’]

FlexiGO’s folding test equipment was selected in the equipment category of the ‘Display of the Year Awards’ held at the IMID 2026 opening ceremony. In the same awards, the panel category went to Samsung Display’s OLED for the Galaxy S26 Ultra and LG Display’s 165Hz OLED, the material category to Dongjin Semichem’s low-temperature OC for COE, and the component category to ISSoft’s LPG(Light Pattern Generator).

Founded in 2017, FlexiGO specializes in reliability evaluation equipment for flexible displays and is headquartered in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province. It supplies mechanical durability evaluation equipment for individual form factors such as folding, rolling and sliding.

Foldy, the award-winning product, consists of four independently controlled environmental chambers and tests panel durability under temperature conditions of -40 to 95℃ and humidity of 30 to 98%. It is equipped with a gantry robot, micro-vision and surface profiling inspection systems, and applies a conductive glass door so that the folded area can be observed without condensation during low-temperature testing.

The differentiating factor lies in the evaluation method. Three types of folding units, for plate, jig and set, can be exchanged by simple clamping, so a single machine can evaluate everything from a bare panel to a finished product. Dedicated jigs also combine fold gap and free length to form various water-drop cross-sections, and software automatically measures the shape captured through a side mirror block. Whereas conventional equipment measured the number of repetitions until fracture, this approach differs in that it quantifies the cross-sectional shape of the folded area itself.

At this exhibition, FlexiGO also introduced next-generation test equipment including Dual-Foldy for tri-fold devices and the automotive sliding test system Auto-Slidy. At the front of the booth, foldable devices that the company has evaluated with its own equipment were arranged by generation. The lineup included the Galaxy Z Flip and Fold, Google Pixel Fold, Xiaomi MIX Fold3, Honor Magic V2, Huawei Mate X5 and the tri-fold Mate XT, showing that the company has covered in-folding, out-folding, flip and tri-fold form factors alike.

The number of folds, a competitive metric in the early days of foldables, has leveled off at a certain point, and the axis of competition has shifted to crease visibility. The capability to automatically measure the shape of the folded area is judged to be the background of this award. Going forward, the added value of evaluation equipment is likely to rest on measurement and analysis software rather than on the repetitive driving mechanism.

The more diverse form factors become, the more conditions there are to verify. Folding methods are divided into in-folding, out-folding and tri-fold, and variables such as temperature, humidity, folding radius and driving speed are combined with each of them. As tri-fold mass production, the expansion of wide folds and reviews of automotive slidable displays continue, the combinations of evaluation items keep increasing.

By presenting an exchangeable folding unit structure together with a sliding lineup, FlexiGO is broadening the range of form factors that a single machine can handle. As long as form factor competition continues, the role of reliability evaluation equipment is also expected to expand.

Changho Noh, Senior Analyst at UBI Research (chnoh@ubiresearch.com)