OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 30

UDC and Mitsubishi Chemical Announce Agreement to Collaborate on Ink Jet Printable OLED Materials Development. The Collaboration is Directed Towards Developing Materials for use in Phosphorescent OLED Displays Fabricated Through Solution or "Wet" Processing Methods.

"Collaborating with a world-class chemical company like Mitsubishi Chemical allows us to share ideas and help each other reach the next level of innovation for OLED materials based on our PHOLED™ phosphorescent OLED technology and Mitsubishi Chemical's expertise in OLED chemicals and ink formulation," said Steven V. Abramson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Universal Display. "Mitsubishi Chemical's commitment to printable phosphorescent OLEDs, which we call P2OLEDs™, indicates that ink jet printable PHOLED technology has real commercial potential. By working in concert on the development of next-generation P2OLED materials with Mitsubishi Chemical, we hope to accelerate this process."

Ron Mertens from OLED-Info.com recently had the opportunity to interview Janice Mahon, Universal Display's VP of technology commercialization.

Janice, could you give a small introduction about UDC, and about your PHOLED products?

Universal Display Corporation (NASDAQ: PANL) is a world leader in the development of innovative OLED technology for use in flat panel displays, lighting and other opto-electronics applications. Founded in 1994, Universal Display provides state-of-the-art OLED technology and services to OLED manufacturers to enhance their products' features and competitive advantage. We have developed proprietary OLED technologies and materials that should provide dramatically enhanced display performance at lower costs than today's liquid crystal displays.

imaging Technology international (iTi) announces the opening of its Inkjet Development Laboratory (IDL) for rental to customers. The IDL enables developers to test inkjet materials and processes on iTi's complete line of development tools at a fraction of the cost of purchasing such equipment.
The IDL is ideal for companies exploring inkjet's potential for nanoparticle fluids, printable electronics, organic electronics, OLED and PLED flat panel displays, touch panels, biomedical and other applications that benefit from the digital control and precise fluid metering offered by inkjet technology.

Universal Display says there is no row between it and UK organic LED company Cambridge Display Technology following a patent UDC revealed recently. The patent is primarily about the ability to ink-jet print OLEDs using small molecular materials, instead of polymeric materials, for light emission, Janice Mahon, v-p of technology commercialisation at US-based UDC told Electronics Weekly. CDT’s patents largely cover polymeric emissive materials and it is unlikely the patent will cause a conflict.

However, while UDC’s technology in this new patent is fundamentally small-molecule and not polymer, UDC’s patent portfolio broadly covers phosphorescent OLED technology, said UDC’s Mahon. It is too early to tell what structures will be commercialised. We have a very important phosphorescent portfolio just as CDT has a very important polymer portfolio, said Mahon. Mahon added: The competition is LCD, it is not polymer versus small molecule.

CDT announced today that it has acquired an important portfolio of patent rights from Maxdem Inc. The portfolio includes five US patent applications and their foreign equivalents relating to new light emitting polymer compositions and applications. The deal also includes a license to a large number of patents / applications relating to polyphenylene polymers and other polymer compositions and purification methods. These are expected to be useful in future materials improvements.

Included in the acquisition from Maxdem is a patent application for the invention of phosphorescent compositions containing a critical class of polymer materials in combination with metals / metal ions. CDT believes this provides a fundamental position in the use of conjugated polymers to achieve high efficiency phosphorescent emission in solution processable devices, whether for ink jet printing or any other means of solution processing.

Update: In March 2011, we posted a follow-up interview with Andy, updating us on Plextronics' business and technology.

OLED-Info.com recently had the opportunity to interview Andy Hannah, the CEO and President of Plextronics. Plextronics was founded in 2002, as a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon University, and is developing critical technology that enables broad market commercialization of organic electronic devices. Such devices include plastic chips, polymer solar cells and organic lights and sensors.

Q: You have developed an optimized hole injection layer for PLED devices. Can you explain that?

The hole injection layer or HIL functions as a gatekeeper that balances the flow of electricity into the OLED, improving the efficiency of generated light, and smoothing out any rough electrodes that would otherwise cause rapid device failure. Plextronics has developed Plexcore HIL, a non-acidic, solvent-based ink that when printed using spin-cast or inkjet techniques form carefully tuned thin-films that function as the HIL.

UDC announced today that it has been awarded a significant patent covering ink-jet printing of phosphorescent OLED displays, US Patent No. 6,982,179, titled "Structure and Method of Fabricating Organic Devices".

"This PHOLED ink-jet printing patent provides another option for OLED manufacturers in choosing how to produce displays using our proprietary phosphorescent OLED technology," said Steven V. Abramson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Universal Display Corporation. "The patent is a further demonstration of the breadth and depth of Universal Display's PHOLED technology, which is widely recognized as critical for OLED displays - from small, where power efficiency is critical, to large, where power efficiency equates to less heat generation."

Mitsubishi Chemical today announced that it has developed an Organic Light-Emitting Diode device with the highest efficiency in the world in its new blue phosphorescence OLED material.

The new OLED material, which can be produced by a lower-cost, wet-coating process, is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of large flat-panel displays.

The newly developed OLED device employs MCC's own blue phosphorescence host material (wet-coating type), hole blocking material, and hole injection material to optimize the design of a device to achieve the current efficiency of 30 cd/A at the intensity of 100 cd/m2 (external quantum efficiency: 13%), more than twice that of conventional blue wet-coating type OLEDs.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) has announced another important step in the development of polymer light emitting diode (P-OLED) display technology with the production of a number of 14 inch full color displays using ink jet printing.

The displays were produced at CDT's Technology Development Centre in the UK, and feature a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels x RGB, equivalent to almost three million sub-pixels, or over 30 million ink jet drops.The active matrix panels use an amorphous silicon backplane, and were made using a multi-nozzle approach - up to 128 nozzles - with no interlacing, and are believed to be the first of their kind ever produced.

Litrex Corporation has shipped the first M-Series(TM) Inkjet Systems to a leading display maker. These systems reinforce Litrex Corporation's position as the world leader in inkjet manufacturing systems for display applications. These new "next generation" M-Series(TM) tools build upon the success of over 50 inkjet systems that Litrex Corporation has installed worldwide at 25 customer sites.
The M-Series(TM) Inkjet Systems are built for substrates from Gen 3 to Gen 7 size, and are designed for precise deposition of high value materials such as those in P-OLED, LCD, nano-metals and biomaterials. The M-Series(TM) Inkjet Systems have a modular architecture that builds upon Litrex Corporation's existing experience and allows new equipment to be designed and adapted quickly to other applications.