US 11175697

I'll search for this specific patent number and check for any litigation or CAFC activity.

Let me check for litigation, PTAB, and CAFC activity.

Let me verify the granted claim set and check for any post-grant proceedings or appeals.

US 11,175,697 B2 — "Display apparatus"

Identification

Note on scope discipline: a search for "11175697" also returns US 10,175,797 B2 (BOE, "Array substrate for OLED display panel") and an unrelated posting that pairs the number 11175697 with publication US 2006/0009551 (asphalt-rubber paving material). Those are different documents with different numbers/kind codes; I have not conflated them with US 11,175,697 B2.

Abstract (as published)

A display apparatus includes a substrate having a display area with a display device to display an image, and a non-display area around the display area. The non-display area has a bending area bent about a bending axis. An encapsulation layer is located over the display area. A touchscreen layer is located over the encapsulation layer and includes a touch electrode. A touch wire is connected to the touch electrode, extends from an upper portion of the encapsulation layer, and is at least partially in the bending area. A fan-out wire applies an electric signal to the display area and is at least partially disposed in the bending area. The touch wire and the fan-out wire are on different layers from each other in the bending area.

Plain-language overview

The specification (already summarized in the earlier sections) is about a bendable OLED display with an on-cell touchscreen. The core insight it develops is that the touch wire that carries signals from the touch electrode down the side of the encapsulation layer and across the bend should be one continuous wire with no contact hole, rather than being made of two pieces on different layers joined at a via. The stated benefit is twofold: (1) the bezel shrinks, because the via for the touch wire would have to be formed through the thick upper organic layer (thickness t′ ≫ t), forcing a much wider contact opening than the fan-out wire's own via; and (2) one continuous wire reduces tensile-stress defects at the bend. The fan-out wire, by contrast, is deliberately split into inside wire / connection wire / outside wire, so that the segment in the bend can be a high-elongation material (e.g., Al, Al/Ti stacks) while the segments outside the bend use a low-resistance, lower-elongation material (e.g., Mo). Supporting structure includes: an opening or groove in the inorganic insulation layer (buffer/gate/interlayer layers) at the bend filled with an organic material layer; an upper organic material layer on the fan-out connection wire that also shifts the stress-neutral plane; a bending protection layer (BPL); and a cover layer over the touchscreen layer.

Independent claims — plain language

Important caveat on claim text. The section of the patent document provided to me contains the specification/summary and figure list but not the issued claims. I therefore reconstructed the claim set from secondary sources (the pre-grant publication US 2019/0095007 A1 and a third-party database rendering of the granted claims). Treat the wording below as a faithful paraphrase, not as verbatim claim language, and verify against the USPTO Patent Public Search / official eGrant before relying on it.

Independent claim 1 (granted) — "different layers" aspect

Paraphrase of the granted claim 1 as rendered by Justia:

A display apparatus comprising:

• a substrate with a display area (where a display device displays an image) and a non-display area around it, the non-display area including a bending area bent about a bending axis;
• an encapsulation layer over the display area;
• a touchscreen layer over the encapsulation layer, including a touch electrode;
• a touch wire connected to the touch electrode, extending from an upper portion of the encapsulation layer, and at least partially in the bending area;
• a fan-out wire configured to apply an electric signal to the display area, at least partially in the bending area;
• an upper organic material layer disposed between the touch wire and the fan-out wire in the bending area;
• wherein the touch wire and the fan-out wire are on different layers from each other in the bending area;
• wherein the upper organic material layer comprises at least two layers continuously disposed in the bending area; and
• wherein the upper organic material layer comprises a first upper organic material layer and a second upper organic material layer on the first, with the second layer exposing an edge portion of the upper surface of the first so that a step shape is provided on a side of the upper organic material layer.

In everyday terms: a foldable touchscreen OLED in which the touch routing and the power/signal fan-out routing run over each other in the fold, separated by a two-ply organic stack whose upper ply is offset (stepped) so the touch wire can climb gently up and over it. That step is what lets the touch metal be deposited without a sharp-corner discontinuity.

Independent claim (the "same layer / no upper organic on touch wire" aspect)

The specification's summary section presents a second, separate independent formulation, and the Japanese family member JP 2019-061242 A recites the same subject matter as its claim 20:

A display apparatus comprising:

• the same substrate (display area + non-display area with bending area), encapsulation layer, touchscreen layer with touch electrode;
• a touch wire connected to the touch electrode, extending from an upper portion of the encapsulation layer, and at least partially in the bending area;
• a fan-out wire applying an electric signal to the display area, at least partially in the bending area; and
• an upper organic material layer on the fan-out wire;
• wherein the touch wire and the fan-out wire are on the same layer in the bending area; and
• wherein the upper organic material layer is not on the touch wire.

In everyday terms: instead of stacking the touch routing above the fan-out routing with organic material between them, both routings are patterned in the same metal layer inside the fold, and the organic stack is built up only over the fan-out wire. The touch wire therefore sits at a lower, more favorably placed position relative to the stress-neutral plane, which is tuned by the BPL thickness over each wire.

Dependent subject matter appearing in the granted set (following the pre-grant publication numbering, shifted by one where claim 5 was apparently merged into claim 1) covers: the three-part inside/connection/outside fan-out construction with the contact hole located between the bend and the display area; elongation relationships (touch wire and connection wire > inside wire); the TFT/planarization/pixel-defining-layer/spacer build-up and the requirement that the upper organic material layer be physically separated from those layers; the first/second touch conductive layers with intervening insulation; the additional organic material layer covering the end of the first insulation layer; the dual-layer touch wire joined through a via; alternating lower/upper touch wires along the bending axis; the bending protection layer; the cover layer; the "same material but different resistivity" limitation; the organic material layer under the fan-out wire; and the inorganic insulation layer having an opening or groove at the bend.

Uncertainty and things I could not confirm

• Claim numbering for the second independent claim is not verified. Sources I retrieved list granted claims 1–18 (at least), and the "same layer / organic layer not on the touch wire" aspect appears in the family, but I could not confirm under which claim number it issues in US 11,175,697 B2. It may be claim 19 or 20, or may have been prosecuted differently in the US relative to the JP counterpart.
• Claim 1 wording conflict. The pre-grant publication US 2019/0095007 A1 claim 1 is the broad "touch wire and fan-out wire on different layers" claim with no upper-organic-layer limitation. A third-party database renders the granted claim 1 with the at-least-two-layer, stepped upper-organic-layer limitations. The consistent one-claim shift across the dependent claims (application claim 6 → granted claim 5; application claim 19 → granted claim 18, etc.) suggests the granted claim 1 was narrowed during prosecution. I could not directly open the USPTO claim set to confirm this, so treat the granted claim 1 as reconstructed rather than verified.
• Priority document number (the KR application filed 2017-09-26) was not retrieved.
• Prior art cited on the face of the patent was not retrieved. I saw a Samsung-family document, EP 3 217 265 B1, using very similar "fan-out wiring / bending area / touch wire / organic material layer" vocabulary, but I have no evidence it was cited against this application and I am not asserting it as prior art here.
• Legal status shown by Google Patents ("Active, expires 2039-02-02") is expressly flagged by that source as an assumption, not a legal conclusion.

USPTO / PTAB / CAFC docket check

• USPTO: The patent appears in the normal records (application 16/137,266 filed 2018-09-20; grant 2021-11-16; assignment recorded to Samsung Display Co., Ltd. with assignors An, Jeong, Kim, and Lee). I did not retrieve any post-grant proceeding (IPR/PGR), ex parte reexamination, or reissue for US 11,175,697.
• PTAB: No IPR/PGR/CBM petition naming US 11,175,697 was returned in my searches.
• CAFC 2026 dockets: No Federal Circuit appeal involving US 11,175,697 was found. My searches for "11175697" against CAFC/PTAB materials returned only unrelated matters (e.g., a December 2025 nonprecedential Express Mobile v. Shopify opinion citing different patents such as the '755, '287, '044, '397, and '168 patents). Per your strict rule I have not substituted any of those numbers for 11,175,697.

This is a negative result from a limited number of searches, not proof of absence: I could not directly query the CAFC docket system or the USPTO Patent Public Search interface, so an unfiled-but-pending or very recent (2026) appeal could exist that I did not surface.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11175697 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me check the Google Patents litigation section and other litigation databases directly.

Litigation Search Results for U.S. Patent No. 11,175,697

Bottom line: I found no litigation (district court, ITC, or PTAB post-grant proceeding) involving U.S. Patent No. 11,175,697. No plaintiff, defendant, case number, jurisdiction, or filing date can be reported because no such case appeared in the sources searched.

What the patent is (for context)

• Patent: US 11,175,697 B2 ("Display apparatus")
• Assignee: Samsung Display Co., Ltd. (original and current)
• Inventors: Jintae Jeong, Byungsun Kim, Chiwook An, Jaeyong Lee
• Application: US 16/137,266, filed 2018-09-20; priority 2017-09-26; granted 2021-11-16
• Subject matter: OLED display with a bendable non-display area, an encapsulation layer, an integrated touchscreen layer, a touch wire running continuously from above the encapsulation layer into the bending area, and a fan-out wire on a different layer
• Continuation/related: A later application (US 17/499,615) claims priority to it and issued as US 11,619,969 B2

This is a Samsung Display portfolio patent covering an internal display-panel structure. Its Google Patents record lists no "Litigation" entries and no "Related Litigation" for either this patent or its continuation.

Sources searched and what they showed

Important caution — a common mix-up

A search did surface a different patent with a superficially similar number:

• Lynk Labs, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. (W.D. Tex.) — asserted U.S. Patent No. 11,019,697 ("the '697 patent"), an LED lighting patent, against Samsung over the Galaxy S21 Ultra. Related PTAB proceedings include IPR2021-01345 (Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. v. Lynk Labs, Inc.).

That is not U.S. 11,175,697. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally, these must not be treated as the same patent: 11,019,697 is a different patent, different technology (LEDs), and different patent owner (Lynk Labs). I flag it only so it is not mistaken for the patent you asked about.

Confidence and limitations

• High confidence that no litigation was reported for US 11,175,697 in the sources I could reach (Google Patents, Unified Patents portal results, and general litigation/complaint searches).
• Caveat: I could not run a direct docket-level query against PACER, Docket Navigator, or the ITC's EDIS, which are the most authoritative for exhaustive case lists (and PACER/Docket Navigator are paywalled). It is possible a recently filed case exists that is not yet indexed by the free sources. If you need a definitive, docket-verified negative, a Docket Navigator or Lex Machina patent-litigation report keyed to patent number 11,175,697 — plus an ITC EDIS search — would be the appropriate next step.

If you'd like, I can attempt additional free-source checks (e.g., CourtListener RECAP full-text docket search or Justia dockets) for the exact string "11,175,697."

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 11,175,697: ZERO. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding naming this patent (as of the most recent ODP ingest), and my independent web checks on 2026-09-30 surfaced no petition, institution decision, or FWD referencing "11,175,697" — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB estoppel in the chain and no PTAB-invalidated claim you can point to — the entire claim set is UNTESTED, and an IPR-based defense is fully available to you as a first mover, at the cost of having no free head start from someone else's work.

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No proceedings to report

There is no proceeding to format under the ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} template. I will not manufacture one. What follows is what I did verify, and what it means.

What I searched (2026-09-30):

• The prompt's canonical PTAB block from the USPTO ODP: no AIA trial proceedings returned.
• Keyword/patent-number searches for "US11175697" / "11,175,697" combined with IPR, PTAB, inter partes review, Samsung Display, BOE. No hit ties any proceeding to this patent number.
• Context check on the Samsung Display ↔ BOE dispute (the only live enforcement campaign involving Samsung Display OLED/bend-related patents I could confirm). That campaign has produced real PTAB activity — e.g., IPR2023-00987 and IPR2023-01075 (Mianyang BOE Optoelectronics v. Samsung Display, FWDs 2025-01-06, which found claim 21 of the '803 patent unpatentable while all other asserted claims survived), and IPR2025-01479 (BOE v. Samsung Display on U.S. Patent No. 11,574,991, terminated by joint motion under 35 U.S.C. § 317(a)). Samsung Display's E.D. Va. complaint (No. 1:25-cv-00908, filed 2025-05-28) asserts the '803, '683, '578, '599, and '593 patents. None of those patents is 11,175,697.

Caveat, stated plainly: I could not confirm that US 11,175,697 has ever been asserted in any litigation. The absence of an IPR is consistent with (a) a patent that has never been enforced, or (b) enforcement in a forum/period that has not yet generated a petition. I do not know which, and I will not guess.

Family note (relevant to any future IPR): Per the Google Patents record, this patent issued from App. No. 16/137,266 (filed 2018-09-20, priority 2017-09-26 KR), published as US 2019/0095007 A1, and the family includes US 11,619,969 B2 (App. No. 17/499,615, priority claim recorded 2021-10-12) and the adjusted expiration of 2039-02-02. A petitioner attacking 11,175,697 should expect the same claim family to be asserted alongside it, and should budget for parallel petitions rather than assuming a single-patent fight.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 11,175,697 is UNTESTED. No claim has been canceled. No claim has been confirmed. There is no FWD, no certificate under 35 U.S.C. § 318(b), and therefore no claim-level record to reason from. The operative independent claims (claim 1 and the second independent claim directed to the "upper organic material layer on the fan-out wire / touch wire and fan-out wire on the same layer" variant) remain live at full scope. Because the patent is unamended, claim construction positions a defendant develops in district court are not pre-committed by any PTAB record, and the patent owner has not had to defend its claim interpretation before the Board — meaning the Board's Phillips-based construction practice remains an unexploited avenue.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is irrelevant here — it has not attached to anyone. This cuts both ways for a defendant. The upside: no prior petitioner is precluded from helping you, and if you are in privity with no one, you face zero estoppel on any ground. The downside: you get no benefit from another party's institution decision, no Board-tested art, and no narrowing amendment. Practically, your entire § 102/§ 103 case must be built from scratch, and every ground you raise in an IPR becomes unavailable to you in the parallel district court case at FWD (§ 315(e)(2)), unless you are a defendant who never petitioned. The prior-art field appears unclaimed; the first petitioner also bears the risk of being the one to litigate institution against a patent owner (Samsung Display, a well-resourced and litigious owner with a demonstrated record of defending its OLED portfolio — see the surviving claims in IPR2023-00987 / IPR2023-01075) with no template from a prior unsuccessful petition.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) traceable to this patent number, and no PTAB appeal history — because there is no PTAB history. The relevant contextual pattern is Samsung Display's portfolio-wide enforcement against BOE across the ITC, E.D. Tex., and E.D. Va., where third parties (chiefly BOE) have filed a steady stream of IPRs on the sibling pixel-arrangement and pixel-circuit patents. That campaign, however, settled comprehensively in November 2025 (BOE and Samsung Display jointly moved the ITC to terminate the related investigations), which reduces the near-term likelihood that a third party generates IPR precedent on adjacent Samsung Display patents that would carry over here. If US 11,175,697 shows up in a demand letter, it is more likely coming from a target outside that settled dispute than from the BOE line.

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Recommended next steps

1. Treat the absence of PTAB activity as the signal it is. Well-asserted, commercially significant patents attract IPRs; this one has attracted none. Either it has not been asserted, or it has been asserted quietly enough (or recently enough) that no petition has ripened. Before you rely on this, confirm with the patent owner's litigation history — pull the patent's "Litigation" tab and the parties' dockets. The USPTO's own PTAB search and E2E remain the authoritative check: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ (Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End) and the PTAB decisions library.
2. Preserve your IPR options now. Because no § 315(b) one-year clock is running against any petitioner yet, you can file any time before your own service date plus one year. If you have been served, calendar the § 315(b) date immediately; if you have not, your window is open and unencumbered.
3. If you need a roadmap for the family, read the sister-patent FWDs. Mianyang BOE Optoelectronics Tech. Co. v. Samsung Display Co., Ltd., IPR2023-00987, Final Written Decision (2025-01-06) and IPR2023-01075, Final Written Decision (2025-01-06), are the closest public evidence of how the Board has treated this owner's OLED patents (claim 21 of the '803 patent held unpatentable; the remaining asserted claims sustained). They are not on this patent and cannot be cited as claim-level outcomes here, but they preview the owner's litigation posture. Access via the PTAB decisions search at https://developer.uspto.gov/dashboard/patents/ or CourtListener's PTAB docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/?type=r&court=ptab.
4. Monitor, don't assume finality. This report reflects the ODP ingest as of 2026-09-30. Because the ODP lags newly filed petitions, re-check within 90 days if you are in an active dispute, and flag any newly surfaced proceeding for a follow-up claim-chart rewrite — one institution decision changes every defensive calculus above.
5. If counsel is inclined to petition, note the § 102/§ 103 posture is unencumbered — no estoppel, no prior FWD constructions, and the patent owner has not yet had to litigate the "touch wire and fan-out wire on different layers in the bending area" limitation before the Board. That limitation is the likely battleground; the specification's own discussion of the FIG. 4A–4C comparison example (contact-hole width penalty in the touch wire) and the FIG. 18 same-layer alternative provides the owner with potentially broad claim scope but also gives a petitioner a detailed written-description roadmap.

I'll verify the assignment record and check for any post-issuance transfers or assertions before writing up.

Let me check for any litigation or post-issuance transfers involving this patent and its family.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 11,175,697 B2

Patent: US 11,175,697 B2 — "Display apparatus"
App. No.: 16/137,266 · Filed: 2018-09-20 · Issued: 2021-11-16 · Priority: 2017-09-26 · Adjusted expiry: 2039-02-02
Source of record for this report: Google Patents legal-events and bibliographic data at https://patents.google.com/patent/US11175697/en

Evidentiary caveat up front. I was able to retrieve the Google Patents legal-events mirror of the USPTO assignment record, but I was not able to render the USPTO Assignment Center abstract page (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) or the assignment.uspto.gov mirror in this session, and no search result returned the reel/frame number for this patent. I have therefore not recorded any reel/frame values, correspondent names, addresses, or execution dates beyond what Google Patents states. Fabricating those fields would be worse than omitting them. Everything below that is stated as fact is traceable to the Google Patents legal-events table; everything else is expressly flagged as not determinable.

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Inventors

Pattern notes. All four named inventors appear as assignors on the single recorded assignment (Google Patents legal events, 2018-09-20). There is no evidence of any inventor departing Samsung Display within 12 months of filing, nor of any inventor-side assignment to a third party. The "all inventors decamp, then a fire-sale follows" pattern is not present on this record. Post-filing inventor employment status is not determinable from patent records alone.

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Original assignee

Samsung Display Co., Ltd. (1, Samsung-ro, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do 17113, Republic of Korea). Google Patents lists Samsung Display as both the original and the current assignee — i.e., no transfer of record has ever moved this asset off the original holder.

• Primary line of business: design and manufacture of OLED (and formerly LCD) display panels. Samsung Display is the principal OLED panel supplier for the Galaxy smartphone line and a major iPhone panel supplier; per contemporaneous trade coverage it supplied roughly 49% of iPhone OLED panels in Q1 2025.
• Does it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes. The claims are directed to a bent/bendable display apparatus having a display area, a non-display area with a bending area bent about a bending axis, an encapsulation layer, a touchscreen layer over the encapsulation layer with a touch electrode, a touch wire extending from an upper portion of the encapsulation layer into the bending area, and a fan-out wire, with the touch wire and fan-out wire on different layers in the bending area. This is a direct structural description of a flexible OLED panel with an on-cell/directly-deposited touch layer and a chip-on-plastic style bend region — i.e., the class of panel Samsung Display mass-produces. The specification itself §[0002] describes the apparatus as OLED (organic light-emitting display) by way of example.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, insolvency, or dissolution indicator appears anywhere in the file or in the trade press reviewed.

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Assignment timeline

The Google Patents legal-events table for US 11,175,697 B2 contains exactly one assignment-type entry in the entire life of the patent:

• 2018-09-20 (executed and recorded — same date shown; reel/frame NOT retrieved) — Reel not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment — recorded on the legal-events table as "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"
  • Assignor: Chiwook An; Jintae Jeong; Byungsun Kim; Jaeyong Lee (all four named inventors)
  • Assignee: SAMSUNG DISPLAY CO., LTD.
  • Correspondent: Not determinable from the sources available in this session. Google Patents does not surface the recording correspondent for this entry, and I was unable to open the Assignment Center abstract view. Do not treat any attorney name as verified here.
  • Context: Standard inventor-to-employer assignment executed contemporaneously with the US national-stage filing — an employment/original-prosecution assignment, not a transfer, securitization, or reorg.

Two other legal-events entries are frequently mistaken for assignments and should be read carefully:

• 2021-10-12 — "Priority to US17/499,615." This is a domestic benefit/continuation claim, not a conveyance. US 17/499,615 is a later application in the same family (it went on to grant as US 11,619,969 B2). No ownership change is implied, and no consideration flows to any assignor.
• 2021-11-16 — "Application granted." Prosecution event; the patent issues in the name of the already-of-record assignee.

Finding: there is no post-issuance assignment of any kind — no security agreement, no license recordation, no name change, no merger, no correction, and no transfer to any third party. The record is a single-link chain from the four inventors directly to an operating company.

Corroborating (non-assignment) litigation context, offered so the reader can see how Samsung Display actually uses this portfolio — note that none of these actions names US 11,175,697:

• Samsung Display's EDTX complaints against BOE in April 2025 assert US 11,574,990; US 11,574,991; US 10,439,015; US 10,013,088 (Case 2:25-cv-00412) and US 9,299,730; US 10,541,279; US 11,500,496; US 11,626,066 (Case 2:25-cv-00426) and US 7,279,708; US 11,081,503; US 10,832,616; US 10,720,483 (Case 2:25-cv-00430). US 10,439,015 shares the title "Display apparatus" but is a different patent and must not be conflated with US 11,175,697.
• BOE counter-asserted US 11,037,994; US 12,266,309; US 12,307,976; US 11,695,017 against Samsung Display (EDTX, May 2025).
• Samsung Display v. BOE and BOE v. Samsung Display were settled and all actions withdrawn in November 2025 (TechCrunch, 2025-11-20), with BOE reported to be paying royalties.
• Samsung Display is currently (September 2026) in an IPR fight with CSOT over CSOT's US 12,133,429; US 11,957,031; US 11,257,891.

The pattern is a practicing manufacturer asserting its own patents against competing panel makers — the textbook opposite of an NPE monetization posture.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11175697
    2017 : Earliest priority date claimed
    2018 : US application filed by Samsung Display
         : Four inventors assign rights to Samsung Display
    2021 : Patent granted
         : Continuation application filed in same family

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data — taken strictly, this is the category the instructions define for "no records, or only the original assignment," which is precisely this patent's state: a single 2018-09-20 inventor-to-employer assignment to Samsung Display Co., Ltd. and nothing since.

That label should not be read as suggesting an evidentiary gap about the character of the chain, because the character is clear: there is no NPE pattern here at all. All eight NPE/troll signals are either not present or (for #3, repeat correspondent) untestable because a one-link chain admits no recurrence. The current and original assignee is a practicing manufacturer that ships OLED panels reading on the claims and litigates its own portfolio in its own name against BOE and CSOT — the definitional opposite of a licensing shell. The residual uncertainty in this report is purely mechanical (I could not pull the reel/frame and correspondent fields from the Assignment Center), not substantive.

Verification link: search the patent number at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — expect a single hit, the 2018-09-20 "Assignment of Assignors' Interest" from An, Jeong, Kim and Lee to Samsung Display Co., Ltd. Any additional hit appearing later would be a material change to this analysis and should be re-run through signals #1–#8.

I'll research US 11,175,697's cited prior art references. Let me run several searches.

Let me dig deeper into the specific prior art cited on the patent's face.

Let me search for the patent's citation table directly and its family members.

Prior-Art Analysis for U.S. Patent No. 11,175,697 B2

0. Scope, and an upfront honesty flag

You asked me to (a) pull the USPTO record for 11,175,697 and (b) work through "each patent citation" for it, giving full citation, date, description, and the claim(s) each reference potentially anticipates under §102.

I was able to confirm the bibliographic record and identify some of the cited/related references, but I could not retrieve the complete front-page "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents) list for the '697 patent within my search budget. The free sources I reached (Google Patents family pages, Justia, PTAB/IDS scraps) returned the citation tables for adjacent documents (e.g., the published app US 2019/0095007 A1 and other Samsung/LG families), not the full examiner/applicant citation list of the granted '697 patent.

Because the operating rules forbid fabricating citations, I am going to:

1. Give the verified record;
2. List only the references I could actually tie to this record;
3. Give the §102 framework for each, clearly labeled as provisional where I could not read the reference's full text;
4. Tell you exactly what is missing and how to close it.

This does not contradict the earlier Litigation section — that section addressed litigation; this section addresses prior art. No litigation was found; that is consistent.

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1. Verified USPTO record for 11,175,697 (literal interpretation)

Effective filing date for §102 = 2017-09-26 (assuming proper benefit of the KR priority). Any reference published/patented/effectively filed before that date is §102(a)(1)/(a)(2) art; anything after is not.

⚠️ Two identifier traps (flagging explicitly)

• "US11175697" as an application serial: an unrelated paving-material document (US 2006/0009551 A1, asphalt-rubber trails) lists application number US 11/175,697. That is serial 11/175,697 — a different identifier that merely renders the same digits. Do not conflate it with patent number 11,175,697.
• US 11,019,697 (Lynk Labs v. Samsung, W.D. Tex.): a different patent (LED lighting). Already flagged in the Litigation section; repeated here only so the "697" shorthand isn't mis-keyed.

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2. What the claims actually require (needed before any §102 call)

There is a discrepancy worth flagging between the two versions of claim 1 I retrieved:

• Published app US 2019/0095007 A1, claim 1 ends at: "the touch wire and the fan-out wire are on different layers from each other in the bending area."
• Granted '697 claim 1 (per Justia, patents.justia.com/patent/11175697) is narrower: it adds "an upper organic material layer disposed between the touch wire and the fan-out wire in the bending area," "the upper organic material layer comprises at least two layers, and the two layers are continuously disposed in the bending area," and "a first upper organic material layer and a second upper organic material layer on the first… the second … exposes an edge portion of an upper surface of the first … so that a step shape is provided on a side of the upper organic material layer."

This matters: the "at least two layers, continuously disposed, with a step shape" language looks like prosecution-driven narrowing. The single most probative prior art for the '697 patent is therefore art that discloses (i) touch wire and fan-out wire on different levels in a bend region, and (ii) a multi-layer organic stack (planarization/PDL/spacer-derived) with a step profile at the bend. The Google Patents "Definitions" block reproduces the published summary, so it should not be relied on as the granted claim set without checking the printed claim.

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3. References I could tie to this record

3.1 US 9,740,035 B2 — LG Display Co., Ltd.

• Full citation: US 9,740,035 B2, "Flexible organic light emitting display device and method for manufacturing the same," LG Display Co., Ltd.
• Dates: filing/priority 2013-02-15; granted 2017-08-22 (an earlier application publication of this family precedes it).
• Description: Flexible OLED with a bend region, insulating-layer relief/groove at the bend, and routing conductors passing through the bent zone.
• §102 posture: Qualifies as §102(a)(1) art (patented before the 2017-09-26 effective filing date; priority is over four years earlier).
• Anticipation assessment: Provisional — could not verify element-by-element. On its face it is strong art for the substrate/bending-area + organic-layer-at-the-bend sub-combinations (e.g., the organic-layer-below-the-conductive-layer concept underlying dependent-type features), but I have no verified showing that it discloses a touch wire running from above an encapsulation layer into the bend, nor the two-layer stepped upper organic material layer of granted claim 1. It therefore reads more like §103 (obviousness) material than clean §102 anticipation of claim 1.

3.2 US 2017/0262109 A1 — Samsung Display Co., Ltd.

• Full citation: US 2017/0262109 A1, "Display apparatus and method of manufacturing the same," Samsung Display Co., Ltd. (family issued as US 10,268,296 B2).
• Dates: filed 2016-03-11; published 2017-09-14 (12 days before the '697 priority date).
• Description: Bending-area display structure with an organic layer and a routing/wire arrangement at the bend; examiner-flagged reference (asterisk) on the family citation table.
• §102 posture: Qualifies as §102(a)(1) art (published 2017-09-14, before 2017-09-26). As a commonly-owned Samsung application, it is not disqualified — §102 has no "same applicant" exception, though it can be disqualified as §102(b)(2)(C) "common ownership" art only if it were being used as §102(a)(2) art, which it is not (it is §102(a)(1) by publication).
• Anticipation assessment: Provisional. Same caveat — it plainly addresses the bend-area organic/insulation architecture, but I could not verify that it discloses the touch-wire-from-encapsulation-layer limitation or the "at least two layers … step shape" limitation.

3.3 Applicant's own background citations (from the sibling EP family EP 3 223 324 A1)

The EP filing that shares this architecture (reference numerals 100/110/121/122/130/160) cites in its description:

• KR 10-2016-0036132
• KR 10-2016-0077554

These are background/§102(a)(2)-type references to the general "organic layer in the bend opening" concept. I list them because they are the applicant's own acknowledged art, but I did not verify they are cited on the '697 face, and I did not read them.

3.4 What else the sources showed (not prior art — flagged so it isn't misused)

The Google Patents record for the family carries a "Cited By (64)" list, including US 10,998,521 B2; US 2019/0386081 A1; US 10,636,855 B2; US 11,656,709 B2; US 11,307,695 B2; US 10,854,843 B2; US 11,515,367 B2; US 2019/0326361 A1; US 11,372,504 B2; etc. These are forward citations that postdate the '697 priority and are NOT §102 art against it. They are relevant only as evidence of the field (bend-area touch routing) and for the continuations.

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4. §102 framework applied to the actual claim set (as far as verifiable)

Bottom line on §102: on the evidence I could verify, none of the references I could tie to the record clearly anticipates granted claim 1 in a single reference. The realistic challenge posture is §103 (obviousness over the bend-area organic-layer art in view of touch-integrated-OLED routing art). Any claim of outright anticipation would require reading the references themselves — which I could not do here.

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5. What is missing, and how to close it (needed for a defensible answer)

To give you the per-reference table you asked for with real citation strings, I need the printed front page of the '697 patent, which lists every "References Cited." My free-tool searches did not surface it. The authoritative routes are:

1. USPTO Patent Center / Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) for application 16/137,266 → "References Cited" tab — the definitive IDS/examiner citation list.
2. Global Dossier for the family (KR 10-2017-0123828 / US 16/137,266) → foreign search reports (KR/IP5 KIPO action, JP, CN, EP) often show the category-coded (X/Y/A) citations that mattered.
3. EP register for the EP family member (EP 3 454 141 A1 region) → the EPO search report gives the "X/Y" relevance coding, which is the fastest way to identify which references actually anticipated/rendered obvious.
4. The IDS forms (PTO/SB/08) in the file wrapper — that is where the "US Patent Documents" list physically lives.

With any of those, I can produce the exact deliverable (full citation / date / description / §102 claim mapping per reference). I did not have that access within the step budget here, and I am not going to invent the list.

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6. Confidence

• High confidence in the bibliographic record (§1) and the granted-claim text vs. published-claim text discrepancy (§2).
• High confidence that US 9,740,035 B2 (pub. 2017-08-22) and US 2017/0262109 A1 (pub. 2017-09-14) both pre-date the 2017-09-26 priority and are therefore §102(a)(1) art.
• Low/incomplete confidence in the completeness of the cited-reference set, and no confidence in any claim-by-claim anticipation assertion, because I could not read the full text of the candidate references or retrieve the printed citation list. Treat §3–§4 as a structured hypothesis, not a finished invalidity analysis.

I'll build the §103 analysis on the prior-art section already generated. First, let me try to firm up the reference set (the earlier section flagged the printed citation list as not retrieved).

Good — this surfaced several highly material references. Let me firm up the key ones' dates and disclosures.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,175,697 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on the "Prior Art" section already generated. That section flagged that the printed front-page citation list of the '697 patent was never retrieved; this section treats that gap as still open and works only from references I could (a) confirm exist, (b) confirm dates for, and (c) read enough of to characterize. Date note: the prompt states April 26, 2026; the source retrievals carry a 2026-09-30 timestamp. I use the retrieval timestamps as the as-of date for "prior art as of" statements.

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0. Evidentiary posture (read this before the analysis)

Two hard constraints govern everything below.

1. The operative claim set is reconstructed, not verified. The Prior Art section established that the published application (US 2019/0095007 A1) claim 1 is the broad "different layers" claim, while a third-party database renders granted claim 1 with added limitations (upper organic material layer between the touch wire and fan-out wire; ≥2 layers continuously disposed in the bending area; stepped first/second upper organic layer). A one-claim shift across the dependents is consistent with prosecution narrowing. This analysis therefore runs the § 103 case against the narrower reconstructed claim 1 — if the narrower version is wrong and the granted claim is the broad version, the case below gets easier, not harder.

2. Section-by-section honesty. Each reference is labeled either VERIFIED (I read text/abstract or a claims listing) or PROVISIONAL (identified by number and date only). I do not state a § 103 conclusion keyed to a reference I could not read, and I say so explicitly where the chain breaks.

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1. Legal framework and level of ordinary skill

Governing law. AIA § 103; KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Under KSR the inquiry is whether the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious, considering (i) the scope and content of the prior art, (ii) differences between the prior art and the claims, (iii) the level of ordinary skill, and (iv) objective indicia. Any articulated reason to combine — including a "design incentive," "market pressure," or "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" — suffices; a specific teaching, suggestion, or motivation in the references is not required. MPEP §§ 2141–2144 supply the operative rubrics (2144.03 "obvious to try," 2144.04 "design choice," 2144.05 "narrowing to a specific shape").

Effective filing date. 2017-09-26 (KR 10-2017-0123828, confirmed for the JP family member JP 2019-061242 A, which describes KR 10-2017-0123828 / KR 1020170123828A as its priority). Anything published, patented, or effectively filed before that date is § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) art.

HOSITA. A person having ordinary skill in the art at the relevant time would hold at least a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, materials science, applied physics, or a related discipline, plus roughly 2–4 years of experience in OLED display-panel backplane design — specifically in thin-film encapsulation, flexible/bendable panel layout, and on-cell (directly deposited) touch-screen integration; or a master's degree plus 1–2 years. The '697 patent's own specification strongly supports this level: it treats neutral-plane tuning, halftone-masked organic patterning, low-temperature (≤90 °C) versus high-temperature metal deposition, and elongation/resistivity tradeoffs as background knowledge, not as inventions.

Why the HOSITA level matters here. The invention is entirely structural and fabrication-sequence-based. Every claim limitation is a layer-stack geometry or a material-selection rule. There is no new chemistry, no new device physics, and no unexpected result asserted in the specification. That posture is the classic setting for a strong § 103 case.

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2. The reference set, with art status

Cross-check against the previous sections — no contradictions found. The Prior Art section's identifications of US 9,740,035 B2 and US 2017/0262109 A1 (→ US 10,268,296 B2) are consistent with what I re-retrieved. One addition: the previous sections had EP 3 217 265 A1 flagged only as "a Samsung-family document using similar vocabulary, no evidence it was cited." I am now treating it as the primary reference, because I verified it published 2017-09-13 — before the '697 priority — and its abstract tracks the '697's claim-1 preamble almost verbatim. That is an escalation, not a contradiction.

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3. The common-ownership trap — a caution that cuts against the challenger

This is the single most important practical point in this analysis, and it is easy to get wrong.

R2, R6, and the EP 3 223 324 A1 sibling are all Samsung Display's own filings. Where a reference is relied on as § 102(a)(2) art (a U.S. patent, U.S. application publication, or PCT publication designating the U.S. that was effectively filed before the '697's effective filing date but published after it), § 102(b)(2)(C) removes it from the prior art if "the subject matter disclosed and the claimed invention … were owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person." Both sides of that test are satisfied for the Samsung-family documents.

So:

• R3 is safe for the challenger — it is (a)(1) art as a printed publication (EP published 2017-09-13; US published 2017-09-14). The (b)(2)(C) exception does not reach (a)(1) art.
• R2 and R6 are presumptively disqualified, because they published after 2017-09-26 and would only reach the table through (a)(2). Any IPR petition built on R2 must either (i) prove R2 is not commonly owned (e.g., different Samsung affiliate, or a terminal disclaimer/assignment gap of record) or (ii) find a published sibling — e.g., EP 3 223 324 A1 — whose publication date falls before 2017-09-26, converting it into (a)(1) art. EP 3 223 324 A1's publication date is therefore date-critical and unverified. If it published 2017-09-27 or later, R2's disclosure is lost to the challenger on this ground alone.
• R2 nonetheless remains useful for the "state of the art" narrative and to show what Samsung's own engineers were doing in the same window — but that is an argument about knowledge, not an evidentiary § 103 ground, and it will not survive a proper objection.

Practical consequence: the § 103 case below is built on R3 as the primary reference, with R8 (LG, 2014) as the secondary reference for the organic-over-wire neutral-plane teaching, and R2/R7/R5 held in reserve subject to date verification.

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4. Claim 1 (reconstructed): element-by-element

Result: on the record I could verify, no single reference anticipates claim 1, but the only meaningful gaps are (i) placement of an organic layer between the two wire levels in the bend, and (ii) the stepped two-ply character of that organic stack. Everything else — the substrate/bend architecture, the encapsulation layer, the on-cell touch electrode, the touch wire running into the bend, and the fan-out wire in the bend — is squarely in R3, published twelve days before the priority date, by the same assignee, in the same product context.

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5. The § 103 combinations

5.1 Combination A (primary): R3 in view of R2 — claim 1

What the combination yields. R3 supplies the complete bendable-OLED-with-on-cell-touch architecture and the two wires in the bend. R2 supplies the organic-at-the-bend layer stack: an inorganic insulating layer with an opening in the bend, a first organic material layer filling it, the conductive layer on that organic, and a second organic material layer above the conductive layer. Read together, the layers above the fan-out routing in R3 become the "upper organic material layer," and the layer below the routing becomes the stress-absorbing organic R3's fan-out via-hole architecture already implies.

Motivations to combine (each independently sufficient):

1. Same field, same problem, same assignee, same docket. R3 and R2 both address "crack/defect in bending-area routing" in a bendable OLED with an encapsulation layer. Where references are drawn from the same manufacturer's contemporaneous filings on the identical failure mode, KSR and MPEP § 2144.01 treat the combination as a design choice, not an invention.
2. Predictable use of prior art elements according to established function. R8 (LG, 2014) had already taught, years before, that an organic film placed on the routing wire in the bend reduces tensile stress and moves the wire to the neutral plane, and had expressly claimed that function. Placing an organic layer on (and under) the fan-out routing in R3 therefore uses a known element for its known purpose, with a predictable result — the KSR core holding.
3. Explicit problem-solving incentive in R3's own family. R3's claims already include a bending protection layer above the fan-out wiring in the bending area — i.e., R3 has already recognized the need for an added layer over the bend routing. Adding a second organic layer below the BPL, and above the fan-out wire, is a designer's obvious increment to the neutral-plane control R3 already performs, and the '697 specification concedes exactly that function ("the upper organic material layer may appropriately adjust a stress neutral plane").
4. Process-efficiency rationale — reuse, no extra masks. The '697 specification itself states that the first/second/third upper organic material layers are formed "of the same material as and concurrently with" the planarization layer 140, the pixel-defining layer 150, and the spacer 170 respectively, and that the layers double as support for an open mask used to deposit the opposite electrode and inorganic encapsulation layers. A POSITA would recognize the strong incentive to form the non-display-area organic stack entirely from already-scheduled PDL/spacer/planarization depositions rather than adding a dedicated mask step. This is a straightforward "minimize process steps" rationale (MPEP § 2144.04).
5. Reasonable expectation of success. The materials (PI, acryl, BCB, HMDSO) and processes (photolithography of organic layers, halftone masking) are all named in the '697 specification as conventional. Nothing in R2, R3, or R8 suggests mutual incompatibility — they share substrate materials, layer nomenclature, and the same encapsulation architecture.

5.2 Combination B: R3 in view of R8 (fallback if R2 is disqualified)

If the § 102(b)(2)(C) exception removes R2, the combination collapses onto R3 + R8, both unambiguously (a)(1) art. R8 supplies "an organic film on the components for transmitting the signals in the peripheral circuit area to reduce tensile stress," expressly positioned to place the wire "substantially in the neutral plane." A POSITA seeking to protect the R3 fan-out routing and to place both the fan-out routing and the overlying touch routing near the neutral plane would extend R8's organic film into R3's bend, above the fan-out wire and below the touch wire — which is precisely the claimed "upper organic material layer" location. R8's own disclosure that the organic film must be tuned in thickness ("the same or greater thickness than the support film") supplies the motivation to add a second organic layer to fine-tune the neutral plane — i.e., the two-ply requirement.

This is the cleaner petition ground: R3 and R8 are both pre-2017-09-26 publications from different manufacturers, eliminating the common-ownership objection entirely.

5.3 Dependent claims — combination table

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6. Where the § 103 case is strong, and where it is not

6.1 Strong

• The architecture as a whole. R3 anticipates the preamble and nearly every element of claim 1, twelve days before the priority date, from the same assignee. That is about as close to a self-collision as a display patent gets.
• Claims 14–16 and the same-layer independent claim. R3's bending protection layer, cover layer, and "fan-out wiring includes the same material as the touch wire" track these claims almost literally.
• Claims 2, 4, 8–13, 17–18. All have express or near-express counterparts across R3, R2, R7, and R9.

6.2 Weak

• The "(a)(2) + common ownership" reference set. R2, R6, and EP 3 223 324 A1 may all be disqualified as prior art. If the challenger's combination depends on R2 and EP 3 223 324 A1 published on/after 2017-09-26, Combination A fails at the threshold. Combination B (R3 + R8) is the safe harbor; build the petition there first.
• R5 and R4 are date-critical. Both are indispensable for the same-layer independent claim, and neither has a verified pre-2017-09-26 effective filing date. Until that is verified, the same-layer claim's § 103 case rests on R3's "same material" sentence alone — which is a materials teaching, not necessarily a same-layer-in-the-bend teaching.

6.3 The real battleground: the "≥2 layers, continuous, stepped" limitation

This is the limitation I could not find disclosed anywhere, and it is where the patent owner will fight. The challenger's argument must run as follows:

Forming two organic layers in the non-display area over the fan-out routing, where the upper layer is patterned to expose an edge portion of the lower layer's upper surface, is nothing more than the predictable result of sequentially photo-patterning two organic layers of different lateral extents — the standard practice for producing a tapered via sidewall so that a subsequently deposited metal climbs with a gentle slope rather than a discontinuity. The '697 specification concedes this: forming the spacer 170 "of the same material as and concurrently with the pixel-defining layer 150 … a halftone mask may be used." A halftone mask is, by definition, the tool for producing an organic layer of two different thicknesses/extents in a single patterning step. A POSITA seeking to route the touch wire up and over the fan-out routing at the bend would have every reason (R8: reduce tensile stress; control the neutral plane) and every available tool (halftone masking) to produce exactly the stepped, two-ply organic stack claimed.

Reinforcing this: the '697 specification's own stated purpose for the step — "the touch wire … may extend, with a gentle slope, to an upper surface of the upper organic material layer" — is a step-coverage benefit, and step-coverage-by-taper is one of the most well-worn engineering rationales in the prior art. MPEP § 2144.05 ("narrowing to a specific shape") squarely covers "a step shape on a side" as an obvious design choice absent evidence of unexpected results. The specification asserts no unexpected result for the stepped geometry.

6.4 Available rebuttals the owner will raise

• Teaching away. R9 (LG) states that "the bending area of the substrate has only the routing line and the organic layer" — an owner could argue the field taught away from building up multiple organic layers in the bend. Strength: weak-to-moderate. R9 is a different assignee, a different architecture (it removes the inorganic film rather than stacking organic on top), and post-dates the priority (possibly excluding it entirely). R8 does the opposite and predates everything.
• Unexpected results. None asserted in the specification. The specification's only quantified comparison (contact-hole width w′ ≫ w because the organic thickness t′ ≫ t) supports the patentee's continuous-touch-wire embodiment — but that is the subject of claim 2, not claim 1, and it is a manufacturing-tolerance effect, not an unexpected material property.
• Secondary considerations. Samsung Display is a practicing entity that ships OLED panels reading on these claims, so commercial success is available — but it must be linked by nexus to the claimed stepped two-ply organic stack, not to the general success of Samsung's foldable panels. Proving that nexus for a layer-geometry feature (as opposed to a bezel-width metric) is difficult.
• Claim-differentiation argument. The owner will emphasize that its FIG. 4A–4C comparison example (touch wire split into two layers joined through a thick-organic contact hole, with the width penalty) represents the art, and that the invention is the departure from it. This is a meaningful argument for claim 2's continuity limitation — but it is an admission against the breadth of claim 1, which does not require continuity at all.

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7. Bottom line

The single most important takeaway: this patent's exposure is self-inflicted. Its own assignee published EP 3 217 265 A1 / US 2017/0262109 A1 twelve to fourteen days before the priority date, describing the same bendable OLED with an encapsulation layer, an on-cell touch electrode, a touch wire extending to the non-display area, and fan-out wiring in the bending area connected through a via hole — plus a bending protection layer, a cover layer, a two-layer touch wire, and a protection-film opening at the bend. Nearly every dependent claim has a counterpart there. The only reason claim 1 survives a clean anticipation read is the added "upper organic material layer, two layers, stepped" language — which looks precisely like prosecution narrowing over that publication.

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8. Verification roadmap (please do these before relying on any of the above)

1. Download R3 in full (EP 3 217 265 A1 and/or US 2017/0262109 A1 → US 10,268,296 B2) and confirm: (a) whether the touch wire and the fan-out wiring are shown on different layers within the bending area; (b) whether the touch wire is continuous (no contact hole between display area and bend); (c) whether the via hole connecting fan-out wiring to signal wiring is located between the bend and the display area. Each of (a)–(c) maps directly onto claim 1 or claim 2.
2. Establish the publication date of EP 3 223 324 A1. If it is before 2017-09-26, R2's disclosure re-enters the art set through a sibling and the common-ownership problem disappears.
3. Establish the KR priority dates for US 10,475,874 B2 (R5) and US 2017/0278918 A1 (R4) and identify R4's applicant. Both are essential to the same-layer claim.
4. Pull the '697's printed front page and IDS (PTO/SB/08) from Patent Center for application 16/137,266. The Prior Art section flagged that the citation list was never retrieved. If R3 appears there with a "critical" annotation, the prosecution-narrowing inference in § 2 is confirmed and the § 103 case writes itself; if it does not appear, that is itself a § 282/equitable-conduct-adjacent fact worth knowing.
5. Pull the KR prosecution history (KR 10-2017-0123828) and the JP counterpart's file (JP 2019-061242 A / JP 7244239 B2) for the cited art and the examination reasoning on the "two-layer stepped organic" feature.