OLED Lifetime: introduction and market status - Page 9

First-O-Lite (FOL) was established in 2010 in Nanjing, China with an aim to become an OLED lighting developer and producer. Based on its hybrid tandem architecture, FOL has a 2-Gen OLED lighting production fab that is currently producing 70 lm/W OLED lighting panels.

This article details the company's OLED lighting panels, its strategy to create an initial health-lighting niche market in china, its current product families and its technology and business roadmaps going forward.

BASF announced that it acquired light management expert Rolic AG, a private company headquartered in Switzerland. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Rolic develops and markets nanoscale surface modification systems that achieve unique light management and optical effects. Rolic has three business units: displays, security and organic electronics. For the OLED market, Rolic develops materials that improve light outcoupling, lifetime and efficiency for OLED displays and lighting panels.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) announced new SBIR and STTR grants for solid state lighting projects. The DoE announced five new grants out of which two are related to OLED technologies.

Pixelligent Technologies were awarded an SBIR project titled "Light Extraction for OLED Lighting with 3-D Gradient Index". This project will explore the application of a novel and unique 3D gradient index (GRIN) layer to improve the efficiency and lifetime of OLED devices. Using such a unique structure, OLEDs could be produced that achieve the theoretical maximum extraction efficiency.

UBI Research says that automobiles will start adopting OLED displays "in earnest" starting in 2018 - for instrument cluster and infotainment displays. The automotive display market itself is expected to grow quickly (CAGR of about 17% from 2017-2022) as new technologies mean that displays in cars are getting more and more important.

UBI estimates the total automotive display market at $25 billion by 2022 - out of which OLEDs will account for about 20%, or $5 billion. The main challenge still facing massive OLED adoption, according to UBI, is the lifetime of AMOLED panels.

Researchers from Kyushu University discovered that lifetime of OLED displays is compromised during the evaporation production process due to small amounts of impurities in the vacuum chamber.

The researchers examined the production process and found that there are many impurities floating in the vacuum even when the deposition chamber is at room temperature. They found a strong correlation between the time the OLED is placed in the deposition chamber and its lifetime.

In 2016, TADF (Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence) emitters have received much attention in the OLED industry as the most promising method to improve OLED displays. CYNORA is one of the most active companies with several years of experience in this field and the company is now getting ready to bring a first blue TADF material to the OLED market.

In a little more than one year, CYNORA has set itself up to become a major OLED material supplier. First, an experienced CEO in this field, Gildas Sorin, the former CEO of Novaled GmbH, was brought in. Since then, CYNORA has shown significant improvement in material performance starting with the announcement of two milestones.

Italy-based DesLabs launched a new product called WiNEOLED - which is an OLED lamp dedicated for wine professionals and amateurs. The idea is that the excellent lighting properties and the uniformity of the OLED panel will unveil the wine's properties like never before.

The WiNEOLED uses an LG Display panel that offer a CCT of 4000K, an efficacy of 55 lm/W and a brightness of 75 lumens. The CRI is over 90 and the lifetime is 30,000 hours (LT70). The lamp can be powered with a USB cable, a battery or via a wireless Qi charging based.

Germany-based blue-TADF OLED emitter developer Cynora announced that it developed a new blue-emitting material that combines high efficiency with long lifetime. Cynora's new material offers an external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 14% and a lifetime of 420 hours (LT80, at 500 cd/m²).

In May 2016 Cynora announced two blue emitter systems - with one featuring a high efficiency and the other a long lifetime. This time Cynora managed to create a single system with both efficiency and lifetime. The company says that they are optimistic that they will reach a commercial TADF blue emitter by the end of 2017.

Researchers from Harvard University, MIT and Samsung developed a large-scale computer-driven material screening process that incorporates theoretical and experimental chemistry, machine learning and cheminformatics, with an aim to quickly identify new OLED molecules.

The so-called Molecular Space Shuttle system was used to design more than 1,000 new high-performance blue-light emitting molecules. It seems that there is still a lot of work ahead to find the best new candidates and actually test these molecules, but this may be a promising new direction in OLED molecule research.

In 2013, the Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) and Nippon Shokubai developed a new OLED structure called inverted OLED, or iOLED, that drastically improves oxygen and moisture resistances. The basic idea behind iOLED is to invert the structure between the electrodes of a bottom-emission OLED. The electrodes are based on an organic material (polyethyleneimine) and not Lithium-based like most electrodes.

NHK iOLED (2015)

In 2015, NHK demonstrated a full-color iOLED display that uses a film substrate. The company now demonstrated the same display - more than one year after it was fabricated - still working even though there is almost no encapsulation.