Solution based OLEDs - Page 9

EMDEOLED is a German company that is developing an OLED based light bulb for residential lighting in collaboration with the University of Technology Braunschweig. Basically the idea is that using an inner-coating process, they are creating a replacement for regular bulbs in which the glass is coated from the inside. They have developed their first prototypes, shown below (unfortunately they did not disclose any technical details):

EMDEOLED's OLEDs are ITO-free, and they have actually developed two prototypes - one with PLEDs and one with SM-OLEDs. The company says that the inner coating results in a very high material yield (and so hopefully will be cheaper than flat OLEDs). The OLED bulbs are also easy to seal as the glass actually protects the OLEDs from the outside.

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is a UK based R&D institute that helps companies develop and scale manufacturing processes. The CPI sent us the following video and update on its OLED/OPV prototype line (built by MBraun) that was designed to enable materials companies, device designers and end users to develop their technology within a fully automated, controlled environment.

CPI's system supports both small evaporized and soluble OLED materials. The line uses slot die technology to allow the coating of substrates in a highly repeatable and reproducible manner with a uniform film thickness of under 50 nm.

Nanomarkets released a new white paper about solution-Processed OLEDs. They estimate that in order for the OLED market to grow significantly for TV and lighting applications, companies must adopt solution-processable materials. Soluble OLEDs have been researched for years with very little outcome outside of the lab. But Nanomarkets believes that the current problems can be fixed, and are worth fixing.

Soluble OLED materials and appropriate processes are being researched by Sumitomo, DuPont, Pioneer, UDC, Solvay, Marck and others. They estimate that the first panels to be made using these materials will be Pioneer's (together with Mitsubishi) OLED lighting panels - planned for 2014. Nanomarkets thinks that if Pioneer succeeded, it may push GE back into the OLED game with their own soluble material solutions. It's interesting that Nanomarkets does not mention Panasonic's OLED TV prototype that uses Sumitomo's P-OLED materials.

Lux Research posted an interesting blog post, in which they claim that LG's and Samsung's latest OLED TV push is just intended to make these companies look innovative, and does not really mean that the OLED TV market is ready to take off. In fact, Lux thinks that only 7,000 OLED TVs will be shipped in 2014.

This is a very low estimate compared to other research companies. DisplaySearch says that the OLED TV market in 2014 will reach almost 2 million units, while LG Display themselves sees about 600,000 - 700,000 OLED TV shipments in 2014. LG recently announced a $650 million OLED TV Gen-9 fab that will have a production capacity of about 50,000 OLED TVs monthly.

At CES 2013 Panasonic unveiled a 56" 4K (3840x2160) OLED TV panel prototype that was produced using an all-printing method. Back in January we assumed Panasonic were using SMOLED materials, but now Sumitomo Chemical revealed (as part of their 2013-2015 plan presentation) that this TV prototype used the company's PLED materials.

Panasonic has been working on OLED printing technologies for quite some time and back in 2009, they teamed up with Sumitomo to jointly-develop OLED TVs, based on Sumitomo's PLED materials and technology. I thought this partnership is not active anymore, but evidently I was wrong on that one.

Hitachi Research Laboratory (HRL) unveiled a new prototype OLED lighting panel that was made using a single-stage coating process. Hitachi developed a new self-organized "spontaneous multilayer light-emitting layer formation material" which is a mix of RGB small-molecule emitter materials. The process simply coats the panel once with this material and then the three different layers (red, green, blue) are automatically formed in the correct order.

The three emitter dopants use the same host material. HRL still managed to create a very efficient OLED (up to 70 lm/W, with a light extraction layer). Eliminating two steps from the deposition process using this new coating technique and materials will theoretically enable cheaper panel production.

According to OLEDW (quoting Japan's Sankei Shimbun), Sony and Panasonic are planning to setup an OLED TV production joint venture in 2013. There's no production schedule, but it's likely that Sony and Panasonic are aiming to start doing so in 2014 or 2015.

The two companies announced their OLED technology partnership in June 2012 - saying that the two companies will jointly develop printing based technologies for OLED TV mass production. Back then it was rumored that they may indeed choose to do the actual production together as well, but nothing has been decided till now.

IDTechEx expects the OLED display market to reach $10 billion in 2013 (up from about $6 billion in 2012). The market will grow to about $17.5 billion in 2015 and will reach $25 billion in 2017.

The company expects only 1% of all OLED displays will be made using a printing process in 2018, and this will grow to 14% in 2023. Similarly, 1% of displays in 2018 will be flexible - and this will grow to 12% in 2023.

Apple has hired a new executive into its Display group - Dr. Jueng Jil Lee, a former OLED research fellow at LG Display, who apparently was involved with printing technology research. Dr. Lee's previous employee (before LGD) was Cambridge Display Technology (now owned by Sumitomo).

Apple is interested in OLEDs, and the company already has several patents involving flexible OLEDs, OLED based BLUs for LCDs, OLED control schemes and others. Rumors about OLED products from Apple keep coming (the latest one involving 50" bendable TVs is rather dubious). I guess an OLED iOS product will come eventually - the real question is when...

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, working on high performance OLED materials. Back in April 2012 we posted our (third) interview with Merck's OLED unit VP, Dr. Udo Heider.

It seems that the soluble OLED materials market is heating up with recent announcements on printable OLED advances. So we asked Dr. Heider to give us a short updates on the happenings at Merck. As always, Merck are quite discreet...