German TADF developer Cynora recently participated in the international OLED summit in China, and the company presented its latest blue TADF material that features a CIEy of 0.18, EQE of 21% and a lifetime of 10 hours LT97 at 700 nits. This is an improvement of the material shown in September 2017 (which had the same specification but with a lower EQE of 14%).
Cynora reports that during the last 24 months, the company achieved its most important goals - high efficiency and a satisfying color point. It has made "tremendous progress" in the last year on the lifetime front and is now close to commercial lifetime specification.
The company's full focus is now on the lifetime of its materials as it aims to meet its customers specifications in the coming months. Cynora is convinced it will meet its goal, relying on the close co-development it has with its collaborating customers (likely to be Samsung Display and LG Display, both of which participated in Cynora's latest â¬25 million funding round announced in September 2017.
Cynora's plan has been to launch a commercial blue emitter by the end of 2017 and the company is now pushing that target into 2018, but as I said before the company is optimistic it will reach its goal. Cynora has over 100 employees and will increase its team further in 2018 as it aims to expand its R&D activities.
Comments
Nice visuals but are you kidding me? If the commercial spec is at 60k h and they are at 0.1k this is hardly close to commercialization. Plus if it took them a year to reach the 100, guessing that the difficulty rises exponentially, I do not believe that they will manage three orders of magnitude in a year.
Good point about the difference in lifetimes specified by the TV set maker and by the material makers. It is actually something that pops up as a topic in articles on this website every now and then.
The commercial TV set spec and the commercial OLED device spec are actually not directly related. The OLED device lifetime is really just the lifetime of the actual OLED layers and is usually only measured down to a few percent luminance (brightness) decay (to 95 or 97%). For a typical display brightness, the blue commercial OLED pixels really only have ~100 hours lifetime.
Commercial TV or mobile display specs usually give lifetime to 50% of the initial brightness, which is already orders of magnitude higher than the LT95 in the OLED device. And all panel makers include some compensation mechanisms for the OLED device lifetime in the hardware and/or the software of the product. That is how they get from 100h OLED device lifetime to thousands of hours in a TV set.
I'm very confused by these slides. I thought the big draw for TADF blue was that if they could replicate the colour point and lifetime of fluorescent blue there would be a big improvement in efficiency/power draw. However, it looks like they are planning to not reach the colour point and instead trade-off some of the efficiency (using cavity or colour-filter) to reach the desired colour point which would eliminate the efficiency advantage and (as far as I can see) offer no benefits against current fluorescent emitters. And this is before we even get on to the lifetime issue...
any chance the slides can be re-posted a big bigger - I can't quite make out some of the figures, but I'd imagine commercial targets for T97 must be in the hundreds of hours.
Hi, you can now click on the images to get a larger version
You are right. Intuitively, I would agree with you. But the conversion from bottom-emission to top-emission is non-intuitive in my experience, so I assume that the high efficiency still gives a significant advantage over fluorescent emitters even if the color point is not quite as deep blue in bottom-emission devices?
Great - thanks :)
I'm not sure even a very good top-emission setup would save a CIEy 0.16 emission. The final display will need CIEy 0.06 or below and targets from the display makers to materials companies have already shifted from 0.12 to 0.10 in recent years. I haven't seen T97 targets for a while because most people no report in terms of T95, but there blues need >500 h (and likely closer to 1000 h these days).
If i had to guess, the targets Cynora have been set could be milestone targets to keep LG and Samsung interested. If they were to meet them, I suspect a new, more stringent set of targets would appear...
So in summary, both companies in the TADF space failed to reach their 2017 goals, Cynora is trying to talk their way out of the fact that there is no market for OLED materials that are not stable while Kuylux prefers to not communicate anything with respect to their goals with PMOLED. (I recently learned that half of the Kyulux team now does quantum computer software at Zapata) Seems that UDC won after all, there is no way around them to make stable and efficient OLEDs.
This performance is not really impressive, in fact there have been academic papers with better color performance and efficiency. Chief challenge will be lifetime, but as the article said, there was virtually no improvement in the past six months, which sounds troubling (will blue TADF run into same roadblocks as blue phosphorescence?).
For the staff number being larger than 100: I have heard otherwise, apparently the key staff is fleeing this place, according to LinkedIn, they lost a EHS manager, HR manager, strategy manager and product manager in the past 4 months as well as several lab technicians.XX