December 2005

An Edinburgh firm that makes displays so tiny they could be used to put a TV set on a pair of glasses, announced its first exports yesterday. MicroEmissive Displays shipped its low-power OLED polymer displays to Asia to be used in "night scopes" for the leisure market.

The high-resolution but tiny screens are ideal for "near to eye" mobile uses. Bill Miller, chief executive of the Aim-listed company, said: "The start of production and the first shipment to a customer represent significant milestones for MED. There is still much to do but we look forward to 2006 with confidence."

Khaled R. Khuda, President and CEO of OSD, announced today that results from 2005 were stronger than expectation. OSD is pleased to announce to it’s investors a strong 2005 return, and strategic growth plan for 2006. The annual results in 2005 have OSD showing major growth in industries of home appliances, military, medical, test and measurement, security and ID, and various consumer applications. web-based traffic is up 50% to 100% increase over 2004, OSD has doubled USA personnel, and made significant investment to operations in North America. Shipments in 2005 were strong including design wins with Tier 1 manufacturers for information security products using the featured Samsung 96xRGBx96 OLED display. OSD has also created a surge of sales and shipments on the new OSDC150-262k-CON a large 1.5 color OLED panel featuring improved brightness, interface, and image quality. Sales representation in global markets has also been expanded for local presence and communication.
Engineers presenting end-of-year results and forward looking materials on new products for 2006 are excited about additional market penetration. New full color OLED designs from OSD are anticipated in 1H 2006. These displays will enter new applications, and allow OLED technology to replacing similar LCD display technologies within the industry. Cellular phones using OLED sub-display panels will now allow main displays + sub-display panel combinations. This innovation will eliminate significant thickness, power consumption, and development efforts. New products are also being designed to improve lifetime, viewing performance, and system connectivity.

Displaychips Inc has launched an OLED driver chip (DC3100), which is said to integrate DC-DC converter for the first time in the world. The chip doesn't need an additional external DC-DC converter to drive the passive-matrix OLEDs, resulting in 10 to 15% cost reduction of the module assembly.

Based on a 0.20µm CMOS process, the chip adopts a low current consumption algorithm backed by a patented technology. The pre-charge technology is said to reduce power consumption to 50% of the established OLED driver ICs.

Fraunhofer IPMS offers customer/application-specific developments based on highly efficient OLEDs in combination with the novel fabrication technology based on the world-wide first vertical In-line fabrication system for organic light emitting diodes.

Especially for OLED light sources the cost pressure on the fabrication is enormous. The Fraunhofer IPMS will show on the fair the first time a novel fabrication combination to achieve low cost fabrication for lighting applications. One important aspect for fabrication cost is the used ground contact, which is commonly build by the use of ITO, a widely used contact material for LCD displays. Due to grow of display fabrication the cost for ITO increases drastically over the past 3 years by a factor of three. For low cost fabrication a low cost alternative for ITO have to be used. The Fraunhofer IPMS makes investigations, inside of the European largest OLED lighting project named OLLA (High brightness OLEDs for ICT & Next Generation Lighting Applications), to replace ITO by a new low cost material named ZAO (Aluminium doped ZnO) . Large area highly efficient OLEDs on this low cost anode material will be shown on the fair.

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Cambridge Display Technology on Wednesday said it has set a private placement of about 2.19 million shares at a purchase price of $8 per share.

Cambridge Display, a maker of diodes for flat-panel displays, said the agreement with institutional and other investors also includes warrants to purchase up to 656,250 additional shares at an exercise price of $12 per share. The company said it expects to raise $17.5 million from the placement.

Mitsubishi Chemical today announced that it has developed an Organic Light-Emitting Diode device with the highest efficiency in the world in its new blue phosphorescence OLED material.

The new OLED material, which can be produced by a lower-cost, wet-coating process, is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of large flat-panel displays.

The newly developed OLED device employs MCC's own blue phosphorescence host material (wet-coating type), hole blocking material, and hole injection material to optimize the design of a device to achieve the current efficiency of 30 cd/A at the intensity of 100 cd/m2 (external quantum efficiency: 13%), more than twice that of conventional blue wet-coating type OLEDs.

A Japanese watchmaker said it had created the world's first flexible digital clock which is as thin as camera film and can be bent around the curve of a wall.

The clock is only three millimeters (0.12 inches) thick and offers better visibility from sharp angles and in poor visibility or high sunlight than existing models, Citizen Watch said Thursday. The clock, measuring 53 by 130 centimeters (21.2 by 52 inches), displays time in black numbers using technology developed by E Ink of the United States.

It consumes less power than conventional digital clocks, with its battery life 20 times longer. Citizen will start production of the clock early next year upon receiving orders with a price tag at 500,000-600,000 yen (4,200-5,000 dollars) each.

The market for inks, substrates and other materials used in printable electronics is expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2010 rising to $8.9 billion in 2013, according to a new report from NanoMarkets.

The report provides a thorough analysis of market opportunities available in printable electronics firms for a wide range of materials including nano metallic silver and polymer inks, as well other a wide variety of other inks made from metals, organic materials and standard semiconductors.

Tekkeon, a maker of mobile electronic products accessories, yesterday announced the pending availability of a new Bluetooth headset. The ezTalker digital ET3000 is priced at $119.95.

The ezTalker digital, said Tekkeon, uses Bluetooth standard v1.2 to get a cleaner sound when talking with people on a mobile phone. The over the ear design features a 64 x 48 OLED which provides an incoming caller’s number as well as a list of the last 15 incoming calls for redialing purposes. Also available on the display is information such as headset status, connection status, battery level and volume level.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) announces two major milestones in the development of long lifetime, high efficiency light emitting polymers for full color, video capable displays.

A phosphorescent red device has been produced by CDT and Sumitomo Chemical which has a lifetime of half a million hours from an initial luminance of 100cd/m(2); this is a record for lifetime of solution-processable materials of any color. The efficiency is also improved at over 7cd/A. Red efficiency is especially important as this color consumes the largest share of power input in a color device, so improvements in red efficiency have important practical implications.