Merck - Page 6

Merck posts an interesting presentation detailing the company's OLED business. And it includes some interesting details. So first of all, Merck says that if OLEDs advances further, it could gain a meaningful share in the TV market. In fact, they forecast OLED panels to grab 10-15% of the total display market by 2019. By surface area, the market will grow to around 50 km², mostly from OLED TV applications.

Merck is still focused on OLED printing technologies over evaporation technologies as the technological advantages will enable cheaper large area panels. According to this presentation, in 2010 Merck started to collaborate with Epson on printable OLEDs (which is interesting as officially they announced this alliance in October 2012). Anyway Merck says that this alliance created a "significant momentum" in OLED printing technology. as you can see from the chart below which shows Merck's OLED development advances over time:

Audi, Philips, Automotive Lighting, Merck and the University of Cologne successfully concluded an OLED research project (called OLED 3D), and developed the world's first large-area 3D OLED car rear lighting panels and installed a prototype on an Audi TT.

A 3D OLED means that the OLEDs have a curved surface - not just in one direction. These are glass based panels. It's not flexible glass (like Corning's Willow glass), it's the regular glass Philips are using in their regular OLEDs, but curved. The material used (made by Merck) are soluble, and the production process is described as "web printing" by Philips (I'm not sure what is meant by that).

OLED Technologies & Solutions (OTS) released a new corporate presentation video which introduces the company and their new inkjet-printing based OLED processing line, the PCA-48:

The PCA-48 line is a 4.5-Gen (730x920 mm) line that incorporates TFE, Ink-Jet Printing, and high vacuum transportation technologies. OTS uses Merck polymer and Small-Molecule materials and their production line supports all substrates (including a-Si using Ignis' technology). OTS that they can deliver and install a complete production line within 12 months, and a single line will be able to produce 40 million smartphone displays in a year. This is the line that AIV-BEX wants to use in their proposed AMOLED production fab.

A few weeks ago we reported about Merck's new Taiwanese technology development center that is focused on OLEDs (but will also work on flexible displays, LED lighting and 3D displays). Merck held an official inauguration ceremony and they revealed some interesting details.

We already know that Merck OLED materials are "used commercially in many products on the market". But during the ceremony the company revealed that LG's 55" OLED TV, now on sale in Korea for $10,000, is using the company's materials.

Merck inaugurated their new Taiwanese Technology Development Center, which will develop new material technologies in collaboration with local companies. The main focus of this new center will be OLED materials. Other areas of research will include flexible displays, LED lighting and 3D techniques. Merck already has an OLED R&D lab in Korea.

Merck's OLED product portfolio covers transport materials as well as emitters and other functional layers. The company is focusing on soluble OLED materials, and they say that the performance gap between vapor and printable materials is closed in R&D. Merck OLED materials are "used commercially in many products on the market".

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, working on high performance OLED materials. Back in April 2012 we posted our (third) interview with Merck's OLED unit VP, Dr. Udo Heider.

It seems that the soluble OLED materials market is heating up with recent announcements on printable OLED advances. So we asked Dr. Heider to give us a short updates on the happenings at Merck. As always, Merck are quite discreet...

Global OLED Technology (GOT) have won two key patent challenges in Europe (defending oppositions from Merck). GOT says this is significant for GOT and demonstrates that they will aggressively defend their patent rights throughout the world.

The first patent was EP 1730249, which details the use of certain anthracenes as non-emitting hosts in the light-emitting layers of OLED devices. The second patent is EP 1828342, which details the use of hole-transporting material adjacent to the phosphorescent light emitting layer. Both of these technologies enable high efficiency and long lifetime in OLEDs for both display and lighting applications.

Merck has signed a cooperation and licensing agreement with Seiko Epson. According to the agreement, Epson will supply Merck with ink technology that dissolves Merck's soluble OLED materials so that they can be used for the production of printable OLED displays. This brings Merck closer to providing production-ready OLED printing materials.

The two companies will also continue their close cooperation to create a strong ink-formulation roadmap in order for Merck to commercialize and address current and future requirements of the OLED TV industry, including the creation of industry-standard inks for manufacturing OLED TVs using inkjet technology.

The three-year long NEMO (NEw Materials for OLEDs from solutions) project has been successfully concluded. Merck, the project's leader, says that the new soluble materials developed in the project can now be used in large-area OLED display and lighting panels. The new phosphorescent materials have an increased lifetime (200,000 hours for green) and efficiency (70 cd/A @ 1,000 cd/m²).

NEMO was a large €29 million project, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project's scope included emitter materials, charge transport materials and new adhesives for reliable encapsulation of each OLED component. The partners also performed physical tests on the materials and on the OLED components in order to gain more in-depth knowledge for future material developments.

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, working on high performance OLED materials. We're happy to post this third interview with Merck's OLED unit VP, Dr. Udo Heider:

Q: Dr. Heider, thanks for taking the time to do yet another interview with us.

Thanks Ron. I do appreciate this opportunity to communicate about our recent Merck OLED activities.

I'm assuming that Merck is still focused on Solution Processable materials. Can you give us a short update on the current status of your materials?

Yes, of course, we are very diligently focused on solution processable materials development based on our customers requests. As communicated in the past, Merck is working on solution processable small molecule materials. Our chemists have devised ways to redesign an evaporable small molecule and optimize its performance within a soluble device stack, applicable to the various soluble "printing" process windows.