OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 21

Nanomarkets released a new white paper about solution-Processed OLEDs. They estimate that in order for the OLED market to grow significantly for TV and lighting applications, companies must adopt solution-processable materials. Soluble OLEDs have been researched for years with very little outcome outside of the lab. But Nanomarkets believes that the current problems can be fixed, and are worth fixing.

Soluble OLED materials and appropriate processes are being researched by Sumitomo, DuPont, Pioneer, UDC, Solvay, Marck and others. They estimate that the first panels to be made using these materials will be Pioneer's (together with Mitsubishi) OLED lighting panels - planned for 2014. Nanomarkets thinks that if Pioneer succeeded, it may push GE back into the OLED game with their own soluble material solutions. It's interesting that Nanomarkets does not mention Panasonic's OLED TV prototype that uses Sumitomo's P-OLED materials.

At CES 2013 Panasonic unveiled a 56" 4K (3840x2160) OLED TV panel prototype that was produced using an all-printing method. Back in January we assumed Panasonic were using SMOLED materials, but now Sumitomo Chemical revealed (as part of their 2013-2015 plan presentation) that this TV prototype used the company's PLED materials.

Panasonic has been working on OLED printing technologies for quite some time and back in 2009, they teamed up with Sumitomo to jointly-develop OLED TVs, based on Sumitomo's PLED materials and technology. I thought this partnership is not active anymore, but evidently I was wrong on that one.

According to OLEDW (quoting Japan's Sankei Shimbun), Sony and Panasonic are planning to setup an OLED TV production joint venture in 2013. There's no production schedule, but it's likely that Sony and Panasonic are aiming to start doing so in 2014 or 2015.

The two companies announced their OLED technology partnership in June 2012 - saying that the two companies will jointly develop printing based technologies for OLED TV mass production. Back then it was rumored that they may indeed choose to do the actual production together as well, but nothing has been decided till now.

IDTechEx expects the OLED display market to reach $10 billion in 2013 (up from about $6 billion in 2012). The market will grow to about $17.5 billion in 2015 and will reach $25 billion in 2017.

The company expects only 1% of all OLED displays will be made using a printing process in 2018, and this will grow to 14% in 2023. Similarly, 1% of displays in 2018 will be flexible - and this will grow to 12% in 2023.

Apple has hired a new executive into its Display group - Dr. Jueng Jil Lee, a former OLED research fellow at LG Display, who apparently was involved with printing technology research. Dr. Lee's previous employee (before LGD) was Cambridge Display Technology (now owned by Sumitomo).

Apple is interested in OLEDs, and the company already has several patents involving flexible OLEDs, OLED based BLUs for LCDs, OLED control schemes and others. Rumors about OLED products from Apple keep coming (the latest one involving 50" bendable TVs is rather dubious). I guess an OLED iOS product will come eventually - the real question is when...

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...

Back in June 2012 I posted about the new Chinese "Stimulated Blue company" and its AMOLED project. Now I got some new details and corrections for my original story.

First of all, the company's name is AIV-BEX,and not Stimulated Blue. The holding company is Aivtech International Group, a NASDAQ-listed (ticker:AIVI) Shenzhen based maker of audio&video products. The Henan provincial government will provide some of the funding for this project. In fact in November 2012 company official met with Representatives from the Henan government and it seems that the project is progressing smoothly and is actively being supported by the government. In fact they regard it as one of Xinyang Industrial City's key projects.

BOE Display developed a 17" Oxide-TFT AMOLED prototype that was produced in an ink-jet printing process. They say that this is the first time these an Oxide-TFT OLED panel was ink-jet printed successfully, but I'm not sure if that's actually true because I think Panasonic's printed 56" OLED TV shown at CES also sports an Oxide-TFT. Still this is a great achievement by BOE.

BOE Ordos 5.5-Gen AMOLED fab

A few months ago we reported that BOE started construction of their 5.5-Gen AMOLED fab in Ordos (Inner Mongolia) which will produce 54K substrates a month. According to earlier reports, the fab cost is estimated at $3.44 billion. BOE's plan is apparently to first start with LTPS LCD and only in 2014 start producing AMOLED panels as well. It's probable that the ink-jet based process is even further away...

According to Pocket-Lint, Panasonic plans to stop producing LCD TV panels in its Himeji plant, and instead use the fab to produce OLED TVs and 4K 20" tablet LCD panels. Panasonic is using printing technologies to produce its OLED TVs (with some help from Sony, too) - and they're confident their OLED panels will be "significantly cheaper" than what others makers can do.

Back in September 2012 it was reported that Panasonic has taken steps to streamline its R&D and put more focus on OLED TV development, and earlier it was reported that the company plans to convert a production line in Himeji to AMOLED production (an R&D line at first). Back then Panasonic said they will continue to produce LCD TVs, but now it seems the company will buy its LCD TV panels from a third party, and focus on tablet 4K displays and 4K OLEDs.

Panasonic unveiled a 56" 4K (3840x2160) OLED TV panel prototype that was produced using an all-printing method. Panasonic calls this the "RGB all-printing method" and they say that all the organic materials were deposited using ink-jet printing. Panasonic says that their OLED panels deliver superb image quality, high contrast and fast response rate. The panels are efficient, ulta-thin and light weight. Panasonic considers OLED as a "promising option for next-generation displays".

Panasonic's panel uses a top-emission structure with a transparent cathode, which results in a more efficient panel (Sony's OLEDs use the same structure, this may be Sony's technology). The panel's TFT substrate was supplied by Sony (so it's probably an Oxide-TFT based panel) as part of the two companies collaboration. Interestingly, even though it seems that they use red, green and blue sub-pixels, Panasonic applied a color filter layer as well - to tune the emission color and achieve high color purity and "superb color reproduction".