NanoMarkets released a new report on OLED lighting materials. In this report they forecast that OLED lighting will take off in 2014, and will start to generate significant revenues for material suppliers. How significant? $1 billion in sales in 2015.

The company says that emissive layer material sales will top $375 million in 2015, with 90% of this coming from vapor-deposited small molecule materials. The report discusses the continuing dominance of UDC in important sectors of the OLED lighting market and the increasingly important role of Chinese OLED materials suppliers.

Universal Display reported their 3Q 2011 financial results: net income (and cash flow) of $6 million (this is the first profitable quarter for the company) on revenues of $21.8 million (an increase of 208% compared to 3Q 2010). Commercial revenue was $9.9 million and development revenue was $11.9 million.

Host Materials

UDC has started to offer OLED host materials to complement their emitter materials. They enjoyed high host material sales in this quarter ($7.8 million) - but this is a competitive market as several companies are offering the same kind of materials. The company said that they are looking to "expand the R&D and material business outside of emitters and to other aspects of the stack". Back in March when UDC raised $250 million it was rumored that the company is looking to acquire a company (Novaled was the leading candidate according to the rumors) to expand their business in that way.

Flight Display Systems has a new Cabin Management System (called Select CMS) which includes all sorts of modules and buttons. The buttons are based on OLED displays, and the company offers three available modules (with single, double or triple OLED buttons). It looks pretty good, and it was already installed in a Gulfstream III aircraft.

There are reports that Universal Display's key PHOLED patent's key claims has been invalidated and revoked in an Oral Proceeding of the European patent office. According to the report UDC will have to submit a much narrower patent - deleting any references to any phosphorescent materials other than iridium. The opposition to the patent was filed by Merck, BASF, and Sumation.

UDC responded to this story: "The European Patent Office conducted an oral hearing on November 3rd. The EPO panel announced its decision to maintain the patent with claims directed to OLEDs containing phosphorescent organo-metalic iridium compounds. A transcript of this hearing will be available in two weeks. UDC's earning reports will be released tomorrow and hopefully we'll learn more about this issue.

Blackbody announced their new Smart OLED lamp family back in September 2011, and they kindly sent us a V-LUX OLED desk lamp for a review. The V-LUX is an OLED desk lamp with two long rectangular OLED panels, designed by Bertrand's ID Medas. The V-LUX comes in 4 colors - gray, red, black and white - they sent me the black one.

Each OLED panel is 100 cm² in size, has a color rendering index of 80 and a color temperature of 3200K. The V-LUX consumes 2.8 W and its size is 35 (H) x 25 (W) x 46 (L) cm. The price is €572.

During LG Display's conference call discussing their Q3 2011 financial results, the company reiterated plans to release a 55" OLED TV product in the middle of 2012. LG's OLED TV will be Oxide-TFT based. This will not be mass production, but the company hopes that towards the end of 2012 they will announce their plans for mass production. LG Display is aiming towards 80%-90% yield in their pilot plant, and will announce the yield in the middle of 2Q 2012.

LG OLED TV prototype

We already know that LG isn't developing small OLED panels for mobiles any more, but LG are developing plastic based OLEDs (using their existing 4.5-Gen fab) as they consider these to have the real value for the mobile solution. They say that as they have experience with plastic based e-paper prototypes they hope that this is will not take long to develop.

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) developed a flexible non-volatile resistive random access memory (RRAM) on plastic. The team used memristors integrated with high-performance single-crystal silicon transistors - which solves the problem of cell-to-cell interference while still providing the performance needed to drive the memristor cells.

This is the first time such a flexible memory is achieved, and this can be an important step towards flexible devices.

Update: it turns out that the ECX332A is the same microdisplay used in Sony's HMZ-T1 HMD...

Sony released a new OLED microdisplay today, the 0.7" ECX332A which offers 1280x720 (720p) resolution. This microdisplay is aimed towards electronic viewfinder (EVF) applications and offers 97% NSTC color gamut, 0.01ms response time and 200 cd/m2 brightness. The ECX332A employs the same white OLED and color-filters architecture as Sony's 0.5" XGA ECX331A (the one used in the A77 and A65 DSLRs and the NEX-7 and NEX-5N mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras).

Apple filed a new patent describing a new display system which incorporates a transparent OLED on a solid white background. The idea is to conserve battery use - and when there's a need to display a white pixel, you simply switch the OLED pixel off, which then shows the white background beneath. The system also includes a switchable layer between the OLED and the white background. This layer can be either transparent or black - which will allow to see black pixels (which is not possible in normal transparent OLEDs).

Apple has filed several OLED patents in the past years. In July the company filed a patent for a 3D multiple transparent OLED displays device, and in February the company filed three different OLED patents, the main one being an OLED with an integrated touch sensor.

Last week we reported that AUO is showing a new Oxide-TFT based 32" OLED TV, and today we have some new details. Unsurprisingly, the Oxide-TFT is IGZO based and the TV uses a bottom-emission type OLED. AUO is using vapor deposition using a metal mask.

The OLED TV features Full-HD (1920x1080) resolution, 100,000:1 contrast ration, 0.01ms response time and brightness of 200cd/m².