OLED Encapsulation: introduction and market status - Page 10

UBI Research estimates that the flexible OLED market will generate $1.8 billion in revenues in 2015, and will grow quickly at a 60% annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $17.6 billion by 2020. The primary application driving this grwoth will be tablet pcs.

UBI also says that Samsung decided to change the encapsulation technology used in their upcoming A3 production line. In their current flexible OLED production, Samsung uses the old Vitex technology which is slow and expensive.

Kateeva announced that it closed its Series D financing round - the company raised $38 million dollar, with Samsung venture Investment Corporation joining existing investors, including Veeco Instruments. Since 2008, Kateeva raised over $110 million.

After years of development, Kateeva finally unveiled their OLED inkjet systems in November 2013. During the unveiling, we discussed Kateeva's technology and business with Dr. Conor Madigan, the company's President and Co-founder. The company already deployed several R&D tools at customers sites in Asia, are are now focusing on commercial systems - including a Gen-8 system that can be configured as either mass production or a pilot tool.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) had some pretty interesting prototype OLED displays shown at the Touch Taiwan 2014 trade show last month. We do not have any information regarding how close are these prototypes to commercialization.

So first up is a flexible AMOLED display. This panel is 4.8" in size and 720x240 resolution (158 PPI). The company did not reveal any more technical details. The company also showed some simpler flexible PMOLED panels, demonstrating their sealing capabilities by immersing them under water (see image below).

Taiwan's ITRI institute demonstrated several new AMOLED prototypes at Touch Taiwan 2014. First up, is Taiwan's first foldable AMOLED, a 6" full-color panel that can be folded inwards over 10,000 times.

The 6" panel can be folded to a radius of 7.5 mm. The whole panel is just 0.1 mm thick and it was developed with ITRI's own FlexUPD technology which can be used to turn an existing OLED glass line to produce polyimide-based flexible panels.

Update: the first video was removed from YouTube and is no longer available

Winstar, a leading PMOLED producer from Taiwan, hosted a seminar in June 2014, and they gave two OLED lectures - describing their OLED products in the present and the future development expected from Winstar.

There's some interesting details in there. First of all, while Winstar is currently producing glass-based PMOLEDs, the company is also developing flexible PMOLED panels. One of the major challenges is encapsulation and Winstar is using ALD technology for this at the moment, developed in collaboration with ITRI.

UBI Research released a new AMOLED manufacturing equipment market forecast report, in which they estimate that the total market size ill be about 36 trillion Won (about $35 billion) from 2015-2020.

In terms of machines, the largest market share (30%) will be taken by steppers, following by evaporators (17%). If we look at display components, 69% of the manufacturing equipment sales will go to backplane machines, following by evaporation deposition machines (17%) and encapsulation machines (14%).

OLEDNet posted an article stating that major equipment companies in Korea reported orders from Samsung Display (SDC). The manufacturing process equipment suggest that SDC is finally moving forward with its Gen-6 (1850x1500) AMOLED fab.

According to the report, SDC plans to complete the orders soon and wants to get it all by December 2014 and start mass producing in Q1 2015. The only major equipment orders left are for the encapsulation equipment. These may go to Veeco for their FAST-ALD systems, but we know that SDC is also looking at alternative approaches.

According to a new report by Korea's ETNews, both Samsung Display and LG Display managed to achieve major breakthrough in their OLED production processes. These new achievements will raise the production yields of OLED TV and flexible OLEDs.

So first up is LG Display, who applied a co-planar TFT with a top-gate structure that enabled the Oxide-TFT layer to become less vulnerable to the etching process. This results in better yields. This design has not yet been applied to the mass production lines. But in the upcoming M2 production line, LGD will use ALD technology instead of the current 2-partition deposition technology. This will reduce costs and improve process time.

Two months ago AUO announced a 1.6" AMOLED for wearable applications. Now at SID Display Week 2014, AUO is showing this new display. The company says that this is the world's first 1.6" in-cell touch AMOLED. The panel is only 0.5 mm thick and is very power efficient.

AUO is also showing a 0.2 mm thick 5" flexible OLED prototype. This panel is made on a plastic substrate and it adopts thin film encapsulation technology - which enable it to reach a minimum bending radius of less than 1 cm.

Universal Display participated in Cowen and Company's 42nd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. This was a very interested talk - and I recommend listening to it if you're an investor (or interested in investing) in UDC. Here I give some of the updates and highlights from that talk.

In Q1 2014, UDC Introduced a new high performing red emitters for mobile applications. That red emitter is longer lasting, provide a better gamut and is also more efficient. UDC more or less confirmed that the GS5 uses these new materials and that's how Samsung managed to improve the efficiency by 25% compared to the GS4 display. Because these are new materials, SDC go back to the original prices (before accumulative volume discounts).