October 2004

Universal Display and Princeton University announced that they have been awarded a $4 million project from the DOE. This is a 3-year project titled "Novel Low Cost Organic Vapor Jet Printing (OVJP) of Striped High Efficiency Phosphorescent OLEDs for White Lighting".

In this project OVJP will be used to fabricate white OLED lighting panels. The panel will use UDC's Striped OLED architecture which uses a series of red, green and blue OLED stripes to achieve white light emission.

Only two weeks after demonstrating a tiled color UXGA display (1600x1200), eMagin doubled the resolution (1600x2400) to create the world's highest resolution OLED display and highest resolution microdisplay. This is not actually a single panel - the display is made from two UXGA displays are bundled in a near seamless manner.

eMagin calls the new display double-UXGA, or DUXGA.

eMagin announced that it raised $10.8 million through direct equity placement. Investors agreed to purchase 10,259,524 common stock shares at a price of $1.05 per share. The company sold 5,129,762 warrants to purchase shares at an exercise price of $1.21 per share (executable till April 2010). The placement agent was WR Hambrecht + Co.

This money will be used for general corporate purposes, including the purchase of inventory, capital equipment, and hiring of additional sales and support personnel.

Leadis reported their financial results for 3Q 2004: $40.9 million in revenues (compared to $22.3 million in Q3 2003) and net income of $5 million. Leadis also published their forecasts for Q4 2004 - with revenues expected to be in the range of $33 million to $36 million. Previous estimates were about $45 million, as Leadis says that they see lower OLED revenues in Q4.

Investors were not happy with the forecast and shares were down 36% in late trading.

There are reports that Pioneer and TMDisplay are aggressively expanding their AMOLED capacity.

According to those reports, Pioneer plans to invest around $37 million to expand AMOLED capacity by 70% (to one million panels), while TMDisplay plans to start mass production of 3.5" P-LED panels in fiscal 2005 (April 2005-March 2006).

eMagin reports that they have been awarded a patent that describes a method of creating electrically stable TFTs for OLED devices having small pixel sizes.

eMagin says that this method enables lower cost microdisplays for many virtual imaging applications including electronic gaming, data processing, and viewing movies. The approach is also potentially useful for creating very high resolution large screen OLED displays.

Pioneer says they will start producing 2.4" 240x320 262K colors OLED displays next year.

The screens are aimed toward mobile phones and will have an lifetime of over 10,000 hours.

Vitex Systems announced it is established a new subsidiary in Japan, to be named Vitex Systems KK.

The new subsidiary will provide development and support capabilities surrounding Vitex's thin-film barrier coating and flexible substrate technology for OLED display makers in Japan.

eMagin says that the new Kinetta digital cinema camera uses their OLED microdisplay. This is a flexible digital movie camera which provides the control and flexibility that cinematographers have always appreciated in their film cameras. The Kinetta camera records everything the sensor puts out, as RAW ten-bit log data, on an onboard miniature hard drive array containing 12 1.8" hard drives.

Kinetta's Jeff Kreines commented: "The OLED microdisplay from eMagin is a perfect fit. We considered many other technologies - LCOS, LCD, CRT, optical - but only the eMagin OLED gave us the combination of excellent color reproduction, lack of flicker, low power consumption, and small size that we needed."

LG.Philips unveiled a new 20.1" OLED panel that features 1280x800 resolution and 500 cd/m2 brightness (1000 nits). LG.Philips says that this is the largest OLED panel ever produced. The panel uses an LTPS backplane.

The panel will be on public display for the first time at the FPD International 2004 exhibition at Yokohama, Japan, which starts today.