Ron Mertens from OLED-Info.com recently had the opportunity to interview Khaled R. Khuda, President, One Stop Displays.
One Stop Displays (OSD) of Winter Park, FL has over a 15 year history of experience for display technology. OSD is focused on advanced display technology and associated services. OSD features OLED, PLED, and TFT display technology. This short interview is a follow-up of our October 2004 interview.
Q: First of all, thank you for accepting to do this interview session with us. Our previous interview was at October 2004. Can you give us a quick overview of OSD today? What has changed since in the last year and a half?
Since the last interview there have been several advancements made in OSD's Organic display offerings. Both large molecule and small molecule organic displays have seen improvements in materials and reliability. Materials used in the small molecule OLEDs have increased the life expectancy by approximately 50% in some cases. For example the monochrome Orange displays have shown experimental lifetimes of up to 90k hours. Improvements in OLED color filter technology have allowed full color SMOLEDs to achieve brightness levels of up to 150 nits.
The capability to produce chip-on-glass (COG) small molecule OLED displays has been realized. With lower production costs the COG process can significantly reduce the unit costs of the OLED modules. OSD offers several standard modules with COG driver ICs. We are able to offer custom OLEDs incorporating this technology to qualified customers with high volume applications.
The pixel density of the small molecule displays been improved considerably since 2004. Currently the minimum mass-produced horizontal pixel pitch is 0.18mm. However the capability exists that allows horizontal pitches as fine as 0.14mm.
OSD has recently introduced the first 20x4 PLED character display to the market. This large molecule module is a drop-in replacement for the popular LCD based character displays.
There has been heavy investment in Polymer Inkjet printing production over the last several years. While mass production of inkjet printed PLEDs has not yet been realized by OSD we have gained a wealth of practical processing knowledge about this revolutionary process. When the process is finally perfected OSD will be at the forefront.
Q: Do you have any plans to provide AMOLED screens?
OSD is planning to introduce AMOLED 2.2" to 2.5" by end of this year and production from first qtr 2007. We are also planning to introduce few more larger size AMOLED display by middle of 2007.
Q: The largest display you offer is a 1.5" OLED display, with a 1.65" screen under development. We are already beginning to see 2" displays in commercial products... When will such screens be available through OSD?
So far we have seen most of the customers that we have in high volume requesting smaller size OLED displays. OSD is designing 2" and 2.2" OLED and we will introduce them in next 6 months.It will be full color OLED.
Q: Can you name some products who are using your OLED displays?
Medical Products, Office Equipment, Audio, Identity Management, Name Tags, MP3 Players...
Following products has our displays:
Q: All your PLED screens are monochrome, smaller displays. What does it say about the PLED technology compared to OLEDs?
As you know the small molecule OLED technology has a few years head start on the polymer OLEDs. Suppliers of the small molecule display have had a few extra years worth of testing and development time to perfect their process and develop reliable and price competitive color displays. However, PLEDs have their place in the market. The current offering of PLED character display are a direct drop-in replacement, in both hardware and software, for character LCD modules. Character PLEDs offer users of existing character type LCDs a very quick and painless upgrade path to emissive display technology.
Q: It seems like things are picking up for OSD. What are your plans for the future?
OSD is expanding our US office. We have recently doubled the size of our sales and engineering office. OSD is also increasing its sales force, including the North American market, Europe, South America and Australia. OSD is laying the foundation and preparing for what we foresee as much greater market interest and acceptance of OLED technology. We believe that very soon OLEDs will be viewed as an acceptable mainstream display.
Q: Can you give us your view of the OLED market in about 5 years? How will it be split between OLEDs and PLEDs?
It is always difficult to predict what will happen in 5 years. But with a technology as exciting as emissive Organic displays we expect OLED market share for small to medium sized display applications to explode. Active matrix small molecule OLEDs are already making their way into mass market devices offered by tier 1 OEMs. We expect that by years end the average manufacturer will be able to buy them as standard product offerings even in small quantities.
At the current rate of development large molecule OLEDs will soon be ready for reduced cost ink jet printing production. Once ink jet pinioning is perfected production costs for large molecule polymer OLEDs will plummet making them very attractive in all sorts of small low cost applications.
Thank you again for your time, I wish both you and OSD good luck!
