June 2015

According to my sources, OLED Technologies & Solutions BV, an OLED display manufacturing solution provider, has filed for bankruptcy. This is a sad ending to a long standing OLED company that started out as OTB Display years ago.

OTS offered a total solution for OLED display manufacturing: in-line OLED printed display manufacturing systems, backplane and display product development, OLED device, stack, and ink development, process development expertise and display characterization and improvement. The company developed a fully automated printed OLED processing line, the PCAP-20, and was developing their next-gen tool, the PCAP-48, a Gen-4.5 OLED processing line, designed to produce high quality large screen HDTV displays with industry record yields and lowest cost per display.

Reports from Korea suggest that Apple is considering to use an OLED display in the 2018 iPhone. The main reason that is quoted is that Apple wants to improve the saturation and brightness of their mobile phone displays.

According to the reports, LG Display may be chosen as the main OLED supplier. LG Display's current small-sized OLED capacity is very small, and so the company will convert its LCD facilities in Gumi to produce OLED displays, with mass production reached by the end of 2017.

Researchers from Korea's Ulsan Institute of Technology announced that they have developed a new technique that can improve the efficiency of Iridium-doped phosphorescent emitters by more than 30 times.

The team explained that this dramatic increase in efficiency was achieved by a new method to synthesize molecules - which resulted in "stronger" molecules. More precisely, the researchers created an emitter molecule in which the two carborane units were thethered by an alkylene linker.

Anandtech posted an interesting article discussing the power consumption of Samsung's AMOLED displays, from the GS4 to the GS6. The basic results are show in the graph below, which compares the power consumption of a completely white screen at different brightness levels:

You can see that The GS4 is by far the worst performing screen of the bunch. Samsung is consistently improving its AMOLED displays, but from the GS5 onwards it also introduced PSR (Panel Self Refresh) functionality which helps reduce power consumption on static images.

LG Electronics announced that it is going to cooperate with Google in promoting its OLED TVs. LG will use YouTube and other Google tools to help increase OLED TV awareness, targeting the global high-end consumer market (estimated at around 100 million).

LGD aims to produce 600,000 OLED TVs in 2015 and 1.5 million in 2016. Some reports say that LG's OLED sales are lower than expected - which may explain why LG is attempting a global marketing push. LGE recently reduced $1,000 from its 2015-model UHD 55" curved OLED TV, but OLED prices are still considerably higher than competing LCD models.

This is a guest post by SCM's business developer Fedor Goumans

To further improve the efficiency and life-time of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), ultimately the properties of underlying materials need to be tweaked at the molecular level. In materials science, as in other fields, modeling has become a more wide-spread tool integrated with experiments for a holistic research & development approach.

In particular, high-throughput screening computational screening may considerably reduce experimental costs for synthesizing and testing new materials. At the molecular level there are a few properties that are important for OLED life-time and efficiency. A simplified set up for an OLED device is depicted in Figure 1. The charge mobility and light emission properties can be predicted with computational chemistry, as explained below.

Merck announced it has began to construct a new 30 Million Euro ($34 million) OLED production plant in Darmstadt, Germany. This plant will produce high-purity OLED materials for display and lighting systems. Production will begin in the 2,000 square-meter building in July 2016.

Merck hopes that the new plant will help it become a leading supplier of OLED materials by 2018, as the company believes that OLED will take a significant share of the display market, and Merck plans to become a total solution provider and not just a material maker. The company is developing soluble OLED materials in collaboration with Seiko Epson.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, used LG Chem's OLED lighting panels in a new exhibition called "What is Luxury". LG Chem published a short interview with Zerlina Hughes, the director of London-based lighting design studio ZNA. She explains why OLEDs are excellent for museum exhibits:

DisplaySearch says that the AMOLED market growth is accelerating, and the company's latest forecasts say that the market will grow from $10.3 billion in 2014 to just over $23 billion in 2022.

Most of the growth will be from the OLED TV market - which will grow from $400 million (2014) to over $9 billion in 2022. DisplaySearch previously stated that they believe that the falling prices of LCD TVs make it very difficult for OLED TVs to penetrate the market.

In a rather confusing presentation, Japan Display's COO Shuji Aruga stated that JDI aims to increase its non-smartphone display panel business to $4.05 billion by 2019 (up threefold from 2014). According to Digitimes, OLED displays will amount to almost 40% of that, or about $1 billion.

It's not entirely clear what is meant by that figure... are these OLEDs for non-smartphone applications? Most companies are targeting OLED for smartphones, actually. According to the figure above, OLEds will only take up about 33% of their non mobile-display market, anyway, and not 40% as was reported by Digitimes. It's not that we actually put a lot of faith in 5 year forecasts anyway.