Sumitomo Chemical announced it will exhibit its latest polymer OLED (PLED) lighting at the Light+Building 2014 event next month.
Sumitomo will exhibit a PLED installation called OLED Cosmos, designed by Motoko Ishii. This installation will use new dual-color OLED panels. These panels (produced using printing technologies) use two distinct colors.
The SID Display Week, the world's leading display industry showcase is scheduled for June, but the organizers already published the list of papers to be presented in this show. Hiding in this long list of technical achievements and research projects are some interesting new OLED developments. So here's some of the achievements to be announced during the show (at no particular order).
TCL's China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) managed to fabricate a 7" QVGA (320x240) flexible PMOLED display. The display uses a thin PEN substrate, processed at Gen-4.5. The company also proposes a design for a 14" QVGA PMOLED panel. CSOT also developed a 31" Full-HD AMOLED panel that uses a IGZO backplane. The 31" direct-emission panel was produced on a Gen-4.5 glass substrate using FMM.
The EU announced a new SSL lighting project called LASSIE (Large Area Solid State Intelligent Efficient luminaries) that aims to develop hybrid inorganic and organic lighting technologies. The aim is to develop a device with the efficacy and long life of high-power LEDs and the color-tunable diffuse lighting of OLED panels.
It's not clear, but it seems that the project will use the LEDs for the actual light output and fluorescent-based soluble OLED materials for tuning the color. According to CSEM (one of the project partners, the OLED material swill be deposited using a roll to roll process.
In October 2013 Mitsubishi Chemical and Pioneer announced that they plan to start producing printed OLED lighting panels in 2014. Now Verbatim announced that it will bring an OLED panel produced using a "web coating process" to the Light + Building exhibition in April. Verbatim will also demonstrate a flexible OLED lighting panel for the first time.
We don't have any more information regarding Verbatim's new panels. In October 2013, however, Pioneer and Mitsubishi said that their panels use coating only for the bottom layer, while the emissive and top layers are deposited using VTE.
Printed electronics developer Plextronics filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company has a debt of $33 million, and wasn't able to find a buyer or an investor. The company plans to put itself up for auction and has an opening offer from Solvay (who offers $24 million to extinguish debt and $8.5 in cash).
Plextronics was /developing materials for printed electronics devices - mostly OLEDs and OPVs. The company offers HIL and HTL OLED stack materials and printable electrodes. The company's investors include Solvay, Samsung and Universal Display.
Reports from Korea suggest that LG Display and Merck are in talks to co-develop OLED ink jet printing materials. Merck is already supplying evaporable OLED materials to LG Display for their OLED TVs, and now they want to also supply soluble materials for LGD.
Merck is focused on OLED printing technologies over evaporation technologies as the technological advantages will enable cheaper large area panels. According to a Merck presentation released earlier this year, it seems that Merck wants to become an OLED solution provider, not just a material supplier as this will maximize the value for both Merck and its customers. The company currently has around 80 OLED R&D experts and around 1,400 related patents.
UK's SmartKem announced that they signed a joint-development agreement with a major Asian display OEM. Under the agreement, SmartKem and the display maker will customize Smartkem's p-FLEX organic semiconductor inks for solution-based flexible TFT backplane technology.
SmartKem will formulate, transfer and supply p-FLEX materials to the display maker which will enable production of high-performance TFTs onto plastic substrates through low-temperature processing.
Kateeva is a US based startup that was established in 2009 to develop OLED ink-jet deposition technology originally developed at MIT. The company has been been in stealth-mode for years, and now finally they have unveiled their technology and system, branded YIELDJet.
So YIELDJET is an inkjet printing system that can be used to produce OLEDs in high volume. Kateeva claims that their system, the first one engineered from the ground up for OLED mass production, will dramatically improve yields and drive production costs lower. Kateeva says that this was achieved by three major technical breakthroughs: is features a production-worthy pure nitrogen process chamber, which doubles the lifetime in certain applications, it reduces particles by as much as 10X thanks to a specialized mechanical design and it offers exceptional film coating uniformity with a process window that’s 5X wider than standard technologies.
Researchers from the Fraunhofer IAP insitute, together with MBraun, developed a new production facility that can be used to print OLED panels and OPV cells. They say that the new system can be used to produce large sample panels. The Fraunhofer showed the "bus stop of the future" that includes both large OPVs and OLED displays:
The Fraunhofer released very little technical details. I think this process actually produces very large OLED (or OPV) pixels , so you can think of these as OLED lighting panels and not really displays. The researchers said that the system includes a robot that controls different printers - and this all is like a "huge" ink-jet printer.
During the FPD International 2013, SEL unveiled a new 13.5" QFHD (3840x1260, 326 PPI) flexible OLED prototype. This is a WRGB panel (white OLEDs with color filters) and it uses a CAAS-OS (C-Axis Aligned Crystalline Oxide Semiconductor) substrate.
Toshiba was also showing a flexible panel - a 10.2" WUXGA (1920x1200, 223 PPI) WOLED panel on an IGZO backplane. This seems to be the same panel shown at SID 2013 in May 2013. Finally, Yamaga University's Research Center for Organic Electronics (ROEL) unveiled new flexible OLED technologies, including soluble organic-TFT based panels (on PET).
