Novaled - Page 7

Japan's OLED lighting fair started in March 8th, and we got some interesting OLED Lighting news. NEC lighting is showing several OLED lighting lamps using their upcoming panels - which will be 10x10cm ones offering 60lm/W efficiency - which is actually very good. The company plans to commercialize them in fiscal 2011 (which ends of March 2012). NEC is using UDC's PHOLED materials, which explains the relativly high efficiency.

NEC OLED lighting

Panasonic Electric Works is another company that's developing OLED lighting panels based on UDC's materials, and now we hear that they too plan to commercialize their panels in 2011. We don't have any technical details on those panels yet.

Update: Here's another interview with Novaled's CFO, in which he confirms the €11 million 2010 revenue figure, and also reveals that their customer is Samsung.

Ecosummit TV posted a nice interview with Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth, Novaled's co-founder and chief scientist. Jan discusses the company's business, technology, OLED doping and other interesting topics.

In the video description in YouTube they say that Novaled had €11 million in revenues in 2010. The company reported around $8 million in revenue in 2008, so this makes sense. We posted our own interview with Gerd Guenther, Novaled's marketing chief a couple of months ago.

Novaled is showing an interesting new transparent OLED lamp design (the "Jumping Flash"). Novaled are using 5 transparent white OLED panels (10x10cm each) and the whole lamp is expandable like a harmonica. When closed, it's a 10x10cm bright light square, and when you open it you get a vertical 50x10cm light strip.

Pretty neat design, hopefully we'll get some more photos of this specific lamp soon.

We had the good chance to talk with Gerd Guenther, Novaled's Chief Marketing Officer. He was kind enough to answer a few of our questions, and give us some information and updates from Novaled.

Gerd, thanks for your time. Can you explain Novaled's business model to us?

When Novaled started as a spin-off from Fraunhofer and Technical University of Dresden in 2001 with just 3 people, the idea was to market its doping technology Novaled PIN OLED^®) along with its proprietary materials. Today, quite an impressive number of well known display and lighting makers are customers of Novaled. That means we offer IP, licensing and technology transfer packages but also R&D contracting as well as trainings.

Novaled 15x15 cm white OLED

Novaled has launched a new OLED market report today, called the OLED Lighting User’s Manual. This is a 200-pages guide/report to OLED lighting which provides an in-depth coverage of technical, marketing and practical aspects. The target audience is designers, luminaire makers, artists, engineers, planners and others involved in the lighting business. This report does not limit itself to a market analysis of materials, technologies and industry players. Instead, the emphasis is on providing an introduction to OLED lighting technology with a view to making and marketing lighting products.

Last week we reported that Novaled is set to become an OLED Lighting manufacturer, moving away from the display business (the original post came from OLEDNet). Today Novaled tells us that in fact this is not true. Novaled's core business remains their technology licensing and material sales (the materials are made by BASF). They are also acting very successfully in the display field and have very good relationships with Korean manufacturers.

So this sets things straight...

Update: According to Novaled, this report is not true. They are set to remain in the IP & Material business, in both OLED displays and lighting.

According to OLEDNet, Novaled is set to become a manufacturer of OLED Lighting panels (instead of being a supplier of OLED materials and technology/IP). They are moving away from displays because they lost the "competitive edge" to Korean companies.

Novaled is focusing on flexible OLEDs based on stainless steel substrate. They will introduce a 150x150mm, 25lm/W, 10,000 hours white-OLED panel in 2010. In 2011 they will add a 200x200mm, 40lm/W, 25,000 hours panel. In 2012 they will improve this to 50lm/W, 50,000 hours. By 2012, their OLEDs will be flexible, too (using roll-to-roll manufacturing process).

Novaled is showing a new white top-emitting OLED, that has over 50,000h lifetime and 30lm/W power efficiency (at an initial luminance of 1,000 cd/m2). The OLED is produced on a metal substrate. Novaled has developed a high performance white top emitting OLED using the Novaled PIN OLED® technology with its proprietary doping and host materials in association with a blue fluorescent emitting material from SFC Korea.

The device has an ITO-free top contact and corporates a Novaled-specific light extraction material layer to enhance the efficiency. At the same time this outcoupling material reduces the color shift over a wide viewing angle so that it can hardly be detected by the naked eye.

Novaled is demonstrating OLEDs made on metal (steel) substrates that are only 0.7mm thick. Those substrates require specific top-emitting OLED structures, and Novaled has developed dedicated ITO-free OLEDs that has a similar performance to standard bottom-emission OLEDs. Novaled is also working on thin-film encapsulation that will enable flexible OLEDs.

Novaled say that metal substrates has several advantages: they will enable flexibility, they have good heat conduction properties, and the "open the roadmap" towards low-cost roll-to-roll production. They also look great and are very robust.

Novaled
and Willing are showing a new OLED emergency light. The size is 3cm by 10cm, and it's only a few millimeters thick. They say that while it reaches all the standard and regulations that are required, it's still too expensive to be sold commercially.

It's exactly one year since Kenwood has unveiled similar OLED emergency lights that also double as speakers.