November 2015

The future of OLED looks better than ever - LG is pouring billions into new production fabs, Samsung sees increase OLED orders, Apple is reportedly moving to OLEDs and flexible displays are set to revolutionize the entire industry. OLED TVs are recognized as the best TVs ever made, and it's clear that in the near future the new technology will become the TV technology of choice for many.

The owners of the OLED.com domain decided to put it up for auction - and this may be an unprecedented opportunity to give your OLED product marketing a huge boost!

OLED.com is obviously the best domain for the OLED industry. Having such a good domain gives an instant benefit to your google ranking and can help drive a large amount of traffic to your site. OLED.com can be used to launch an OLED TV shop, as a technology showcase for OLED makers, as a B2B marketing site or to hugely support any OLED related online activity possible. OLED.com is listed at Flippa.com, a well known domain auction site (which I have used successfully before, personally).

In January 2013, Merck said that the performance gap between soluble and evaporable OLED emitters is closed - at least in the lab. Earlier this month at the OLED World Summit the company revealed the development results of their phosphorescent materials, comparing them to UDC's materials (as published on UDC's website).

Merck's red emitter features an efficiency of 19.1cd/A, a lifetime (L90) of 5,900 hours and the CIE is (0.66, 0.34). UDC's red material features an efficiency of 29 cd/A and a lifetime of 23,000 hours. Merck's green material features an of 76.4cd/A, a lifetime of 5,200 hours, and the CIE is (0.32, 0.63). UDCs green features an efficiency of 85 cd/A and lifetime of 18,000 hours, The CIE is similar (0.31, 0.63).

Allied Market Research released a new OLED market report (World Organic LED Market - Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014 - 2020) in which they forecast that the OLED market will grow at a 18.3% CAGR from 2015 to 2020, reaching $37.2 billion by 2020.

The report covers both display and lighting panels. Allied sees the OLED lighting market growing quickly (45.8% CAGR) in the near future. Allied says that the commercial OLED lighting segment was the largest market segment in 2014 - reaching revenues of $245.4 million.

LG Display announced that it will build a new OLED display plant in Paju, Korea. The P10 fab will mainly make large-size OLED TV panels and flexible OLED panels - but LGD also expect to produce future display technologies such as transparent OLEDs at the new plant. LG Display's CEO says that this is an "historical investment" for the display industry as it will expand the OLED market and accelerate future display technology development.

The P10 is going to be a large plant - with an area of 382x265 meters (similar to 14 football fields) and will be 100 meters high. The OLED TV lines will be Gen-9 lines while the flexible OLED lines will host smaller substrates. The first production line is scheduled for mass production in the first half of 2018.

Taiwan's ITRI research institute developed a long-lasting OLED blue emitter. The researchers used a green phosphorescent emitter with a new double metal structure - that emits a blue light. The so-called Plasmon-Coupled Organic Light Emitting Diode (PCOLED) structure's lasts 27 times as long as a blue fluorescent emitter.

The researchers explain that a regular green phosphorescent emitter always emits a very weak emission. By using the double-metal structure, more plasmons are generated which means a larger blue emission. This is not an up-conversion process - but merely a change in conditions within the green material. This condition was actually discovered by accident.

In the past few weeks I have read dozens of stories regarding Apple and their display choice for future iPhones. Some reports say that they aim to adopt OLEDs in their future iPhones starting in 2017, some say Apple decided to remain with LCDs... One thing for sure - the 2016 iPhones will use an LCD and not an OLED.

One of the major reasons for that is that Apple sells around 200 million iPhones in a year - and there's simply not enough OLED production capacity for that. New reports from Japan say that Apple does want to switch to OLEDs - and is in talks with suppliers to secure the capacity and increase the lifetime and performance of OLEDs.

Researchers from Oxford University developed a new technology based on phase-change materials (similar to ones used in re-writable DVDs) that can be used to create non-volatile highly-efficient displays - similar to E Ink displays. The University established a new company called Bodle Technologies to commercialize this new technology.

The phase-change materials can manipulate light and can be used to filter, steer or dim light using very little power. Bodle already demonstrated a sub-100 nm pixel size and a very rich color gamut - they say it exceeds "other display technologies", although it's not clear what they mean by that...

Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University has been pursuing blue-light free OLED panels for a long time, developing orange-colored (1,914K) OLED panels which they claim is much healthier than regular OLEDs or LED devices.

In November 2014, we reported that Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed technology Tsing-Hua's technology, with an aim to produce such panels by early 2015. This did not happen, but today we hear that the Taiwanese government decided to fund WiseChip development - awarding the company with 10 million NTD (about $300,000 USD) each year for two years - and the Wisechip will be able to start mass producing those 1900K OLEDs.

OLED-Info takes great pride in inviting its readers to check out Perovskite-Info.com, our new site focused on perovskite developments, applications and market. We treat it with the same amount of care and deliberation as our other sites, to bring you only the best and most up-to-date picture of the happenings in the field.

Perovskites are a fascinating group of materials that share a similar structure and display a myriad of exciting properties like superconductivity, magnetoresistance and more. These easily synthesized materials are considered the future of solar cells, as their distinctive structure makes them perfect for enabling low-cost, efficient photovoltaics. They are also predicted to play a role in next-gen electric vehicle batteries, sensors, displays, lasers and much more.

The US PTO published a new patent application from Apple that describes an OLED display with a built-in fingerprint reader. The idea is that integrating Near Infrared (NIR) emitters and detectors between the OLED subpixels will enable a much thinner design compared to separate display and detector layers. This also means that there is no need to have a separate reader in the home button as in current iPhones.

The Fraunhofer Institute has demonstrated bi-directional OLED microdisplays back in 2012 that are based on a similar idea - embedding photo detectors (in the visible light range, in that case) within the OLED sub pixels. The latest prototype unveiled in 2015 supports SVGA resolution and a hi-res image sensor. The bi-directional displays are available for sampling.