DuPont - Page 2

During the OLED World Summit, an analyst from UBI gave an interesting presentation, showing the company's view of the current status of the OLED TV industry, and their OLED market forecasts for upcoming years.

So first of all, we have LG and Samsung. LGD has obviously been successful in launching WOLED OLED TVs, and scaling up to mass production has been achieved. LG is also hopeful that solution processing will enable them to produce RGB-structured OLEDs efficiently. LG is collaborating with Merck and Espon on printing technologies.

DuPont announced the opening of a new state-of-the-art, scale-up manufacturing facility designed to deliver production scale quantities of advanced solution-based printed OLED materials. DuPont specifically says that these materials will target OLED TV applications.

The new OLED facility has large-scale formulation systems and can support simultaneous production of multiple product lines. DuPont invested over $20 million in this new facility, which was also funded by a grant from the state of Delaware back in 2012.

Kateeva and DuPont announced that they will co-develop solutions for ink-jet printed OLEDs - specifically they will optimize DuPont's soluble materials for Kateeva's inkjet systems. The two companies hope this collaboration will enable then to offer a simple and highly-effective OLED TV printing process.

This follows Kateeva's agreement with Sumiomo Chemical that aims to pair Sumitomo's PLED materials to Kateeva's YieldJet OLED ink-jet printing platform.

DuPont has been working on OLED materials and processes for a long time, but it's been a while since we heard any update. David Flattery, DuPont's OLED unit Director of Operations was kind enough to update us on the company's materials and OLED technologies.

Q: Dave - thanks for this interview. We know that DuPont is focusing on soluble OLED materials and processes. When do you see the OLED display industry starting to adopt such materials?

DuPont is focused on developing OLED materials for evaporation and soluble technologies, as well as working with our partners on our proprietary printing process.

Many in the industry believe that 2017 will be the year of mass production for printed OLED televisions, and while we cannot disclose the manufacturing plans for our partners, we have already seen one large manufacturer announce that they will pilot solution- processed OLED displays up to gen-8 in 2015.

DuPont announced that it is extending its collaboration with the Holst Centre. This collaboration is expected to advance technology in the areas of OLED lighting, wearable electronics, in-mold electronics, sensors and smart packaging.

DuPont says that they hope this collaboration will generate innovation that will be key to unlock new opportunities in this market. The company recently announced advances in nano-silver conductor inks for OLED lighting.

DuPont developed new screen-printable nano-silver conductor ink that can be used to make grids and bus lines for OLED lighting panels. DuPont says that these materials are less expensive compared to materials currently used for such panels, and they offer a simpler manufacturing process.

DuPont estimates that these new inks will be commercially available next year. The inks provide extremely high conductivity and excellent adhesion even after substrate cleaning steps. They can be used on glass and flexible polymer substrates such as DuPont's own Kapton polyimide films and polyethylene naphthalate (PEN).

Just before SID, the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) announced that they managed to fabricate the world's largest (7.4") flexible (bendable) OLED using Mixed-Oxide TFTs. Those MO-TFTs deliver high performance (fast switching speeds and reduced power consumption), are quite cost-effective and can be produced on existing a-Si production lines. The FDC demonstrated this panel at SID.

This OLED panel was developed with funding from the US Army features 480x360 (81 ppi) resolution, has an Oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplane and is built on a PEN (polyethylene naphthalate) substrate. It was developed in collaboration with Universal Display, DuPont (Teijin film), Sunic and Henkel.

Dupont published some new OLED material specification, you can see them in the photo below. The lifetime (LT50) of their Blue fluorescent material is now over 33,000 hours (the the 0.14c0.13 blue, anyway) - which they say is good enough for OLED TVs. Their solution-processed materials are now more efficient than their evaporated-materials, but lifetime is probably lower (it's a bit hard to know since they only publish LT95 for those materials).

I had an interesting discussion with a Dupont employee involved in their OLED program. In January 2012 it was reported that the company is building a $30 million pilot production line for OLED TV displays using their new nozzle printing technology. It turns out that the report wasn't accurate - the facility that DuPont is building is a material production facility. They have no intention to start producing displays...

Universal Display's management presented in an investor conference (Deutsche Bank's Clean Tech, Utilities and Power Conference). They gave an interesting introduction to the company and its business. In the Q&A, Sid Rosenblatt, the company's CFO says that currently their green PHOLED emitter is used in only two products: the Motorola Droid RAZR and the Sony Vita. This is set to change and they expect more products in the second half of 2012.

This explains why UDC's first quarter revenues were lower than expected - while red emitters sales were up 150% over last year, the green emitter sales have dropped, due to low Vita sales and high volume purchases in the previous quarter.

Update: It turns out that DuPoint's facility will only produce materials, not any kind of display panels...

DuPont announced that it is building a $30 million OLED TV pilot production line at its Stine-Haskell Research Center off Elkton Road in Newark. DuPont will allocate 26 engineers and 9 professional works for the project. Delaware announced it will allocate $920,000 grant from the Delaware Strategic Fun to help fund this project. It isn't likely that DuPont actually considers establishing a full-scale OLED TV production facility in the US, the aim is probably to develop manufacturing technology.

DuPont's new pilot line will use their nozzle-printing (or "spray-printing") technology which uses a continuous stream of ink (unlike the droplets used in regular inkjet printing) to deposit OLED materials. This is a very fast process - DuPont says it can print a 50" TV in under 2 minutes, but the display isn't optimized in the sub-pixel level and is so less efficient than in other patterning technologies. But the faster throughput can lead to cheaper displays - in fact DuPont claims that this technology may make an OLED TV cheaper than an LCD TV.