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".
This new development center will hopefully help Taiwanese companies to accelerate their OLED program. The two main Taiwanese display companies, AU Optronics and Innolux both has OLED programs, but are yet to start mass production of AMOLED panels. AUO will hopefully begin to mass produce AMOLEDs in 2013. In the meantime AUO is also working on large sized panels: it is making 56" substrates for Sony and Panasonic prototype OLED panels and the company also developed the world's largest AMOLED panel to date at 65". Innolux aimed to start small scale AMOLED production in Q4 2012, but that didn't happen.
Sources: Digitimes
Disclosure: Merck is an OLED-Info sponsor
