July 2005

Eastman Kodak Company is licensing its OLED display technology to Korea's Orion OLED. This brings to more than 15 the number of display manufacturers licensing Kodak's passive matrix organic display technology.

The royalty-bearing license to Orion OLED covers use of passive matrix OLED modules in a variety of flat panel display applications. The agreement also gives Orion OLED the opportunity to purchase Kodak's patented OLED materials for use in manufacturing displays.

It's already established that organic electronics will be a $30 billion business in 2015 mainly due to logic, displays and lighting. It will be a $250 billion business in 2025, with at least ten billion dollars sales from logic/ memory, OLED displays for electronic products, OLED billboard, signage etc, non-emissive organic displays, OLED lighting, batteries and photovoltaics, with sensors almost at that level. And almost all of these products will be printed, flexible, laminar constructions using the same or similar processes. Important other products such as laminar organic fuel cells and organic electrostatic and RF protection are also in the forecasts.

There are few other technologies that will have such an impact on industry in the next twenty years. Organic electronics in the form of smart packaging, electronic billboards, posters, signage and electronic books will impact the conventional printing and publishing industry. Organic lighting will severely dent sales of both incandescent and fluorescent lighting in the second decade from now.

Revenues of $13.5 million for the second quarter of 2005 were in line with the guidance provided at the last earnings call and reflected a 17% increase sequentially from $11.6 million in the first quarter of 2005. Under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), second quarter net loss was $2.6 million as compared to a net loss of $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2005. Net loss per basic share was $0.09 as compared to a net loss per basic share of $0.09 in the first quarter of 2005.

OLED and TFT sales accounted for approximately 40% and 10% of revenue respectively.

OLED unit shipments increased by about 80% over the prior quarter, largely due to renewed interest from the handset market.

Univision has released a 132 x 64 resolution four-area colour OLED display. The UG-3264GMCAT01 measures 29.464mm and the majority of the screen is lit in blue.
Four smaller areas along the top of the display can be displayed in yellow, orange, green and light blue.

The display has an onboard TCP controller, is 1.8mm thick and weighs only 2.2g. It operates from 2.4V to 3.5V and has an operating temperature of -20°C to 70°C. It has a contrast ratio of more than 100:1 and a viewing angle of over 160°.
The display has a refresh rate of 100 frames a second, which means it is suitable for full motion video.

Cambridge Display Technology, which is helping MicroEmissive Displays (MED) to overcome its manufacturing problems, is confident that MED will resolve its issues satisfactorily.

"CDT and MED are closely collaborating," Dr S B Cha, CDT’s commercial v-p, told Electronics Weekly. "We are more than just a licensing company we are a research services company. All of our licensees find you start manufacturing at a low level, and then find the technological advances which give you increases in yield," he said.

Produced by the Art Lebedev Studio in Moscow the Optimus OLED keyboard is so simple, yet demonstrates such common sense, I can’t believe no one has done it before (cue many readers telling me someone has). The concept is thus: every key features an inbuilt colour OLED. That’s right, no more memorizing every button in Word/Photoshop, Half Life 2 or even foreign alphabets, the keys themselves change to illustrate what is what.

Even smarter is the fact that these buttons are customizable. Images and words can be uploaded to each button and a different action assigned to it. Want to label the button Reload or Jump instead of testing the old grey matter, no problemo. Don’t like certain keys being in certain positions, swap them round.

New research by IDTechEx finds that organic electronics will be a $30 billion business by 2015 mainly due to logic/memory, displays and lighting. The report, entitled 'Organic Electronics Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2005-2025' indicates that this could rise to $250 billion by 2025, with major sales from logic/memory; OLED displays for electronic products; OLED billboard and signage; non-emissive organic displays; as well as lighting, batteries and photovoltaics.

Almost all of these products will be flexible, laminar constructions which are printed using the same or similar processes.

The new product, first to be shown on July 14 at the Tokyo International Forum, is a film substrate-based bendable color e-paper. Similar to Flash memory, the display integrates a non-volatile data memory function that is able to continuously display the same image without being connected to a power supply. Electricity is only needed when users want to change the displayed content. According to Fujitsu, the material used enables high-resolution and "vivid color" images that are unaffected even when the screen is bent.

Fujitsu did not provide any details about the screen, but said the new technology consumes only 1/100 to 1/10,000 the energy of conventional display technologies. Possible applications for the paper could be advertising and information displays, restaurant menus, operating manuals or even digital photo frames that typically require a continuous power supply today.
Fujitsu said the displays will become available commercially in the April 2006 to March 2007 timeframe.

Merck KGaA may start selling OLED Lighting products by the end of this year, Edgar Boehm, head of Merck's OLED business told the Financial Times Deutschland.

'Our internal plans call for us to start selling the first commercial products by the end of this year,' Boehm told the newspaper.

However, Merck has no set deadline for launching its OLED sales, and representatives at the company's German headquarters said the new products may not reach the market this year.

Adamond's ZK1 is the first Flash-based music player to ship with 2GB of storage capacity, at least according to Adamond. The ZK1 is cigarette shaped and has a 128x64 multi-line blue and yellow PMOLED panel.