Polymer OLEDs (PLED): introduction and market status - Page 3

Universal Display and Sumitomo Chemical signed an OLED Technology License Agreement. UDC granted Sumitomo license rights to manufacture and sell solution-processed OLED lighting products. The agreement runs for the life of Universal Display’s relevant intellectual property rights.

Sumitomo aims to use UDC's technologies to increase the efficacy of their PLED lighting panels. The company will "explore business opportunities in lighting applications that take their printed polymer OLED technology to the next generation lighting.

Kateeva and Sumiomo Chemical announced a non-exclusive key partnership to pair Sumitomo's PLED materials to Kateeva's YieldJet OLED ink-jet printing platform. The two companies hope this collaboration will lead to adoption of P-OLED inkjet printing by OLED TV makers.

Kateeva and Sumitomo will cooperate to co-develop high-quality reference data for customers, which will be optmized to Kateeva's platform and Sumitomo's inks.

Last month Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic announced the formation of a new OLED company. JOLED, funded by the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, will be established formally in January 2015, and will focus mainly on medium sized OLEDs for tablet applications.

JDI 5.2-inch FHD OLED prototype

One of the key questions surrounding JOLED is the technology choice. While Sony (and JDI, which is basing its OLED program on Sony's tech) is using small-molecule OLEDs and an evaporation process, Panasonic based its OLED development on Sumitomo's PLED materials and printing technologies.

A report from Japan suggests that Panasonic decided to withdraw from the OLED TV business as production costs are too high for the Japanese company. According to the report, Panasonic hopes to sale its OLED business to Japan Display (an agreement is expected next month).

This report is not confirmed yet. It is rather surprising as Panasonic's OLED business is focused on TV panels, while Japan Display is producing small/medium displays. In the past few years, Panasonic focused on printing technologies using Sumitomo's PLED materials.

In 2012 we posted about light-emitting electrochemical cells (LEC), a cheaper (but less efficient) flexible alternative to OLED lighting. Back then, three Universities (in Sweden and Denmark), involved with Polymer LEC (P-LEC) research, launched a company called LunaLEC to develop and commercialize the technology.

Now LunaLEC unveiled a new technology that can be used to fabricate 3D LECs in air using spray-spintering. This fault-tolerant fabrication technique can produce multi colored large-area emission patterns via sequential deposition of different inks based on identical solvents. The technique can also be used to deposit LECs on complex-shaped surfaces - for example the fork you see above. This is done in-air without the use of cleanrooms.

Sumitomo Chemical announced it will exhibit its latest polymer OLED (PLED) lighting at the Light+Building 2014 event next month.

Sumitomo will exhibit a PLED installation called OLED Cosmos, designed by Motoko Ishii. This installation will use new dual-color OLED panels. These panels (produced using printing technologies) use two distinct colors.

In June 2012, Sony and Panasonic announced that two companies will jointly develop technologies for OLED TV panels mass production. Now the two Japanese companies announced that they canceled the joint development. The two companies will continue to develop OLED technologies independently, but will focus on UHD LCDs. Sony and Panasonic explains tha OLED TVs did "not deliver the growth originally envisioned, and are unlikely to be commercially viable in the near future.

Sony 56-inch 4K OLED TV prototype

In January 2013 (during last year's CES event), the two companies unveiled 56" 4K OLED TV prototypes. The Oxide-TFT substrate was produced by AUO. We know that Panasonic used an ink-jet printing process, Sumitomo's PLED materials and a direct-emission architecture. Sony used their own Super Top Emission OLED technology and evaporable OLED materials.

Kateeva is a US based startup that was established in 2009 to develop OLED ink-jet deposition technology originally developed at MIT. The company has been been in stealth-mode for years, and now finally they have unveiled their technology and system, branded YIELDJet.

So YIELDJET is an inkjet printing system that can be used to produce OLEDs in high volume. Kateeva claims that their system, the first one engineered from the ground up for OLED mass production, will dramatically improve yields and drive production costs lower. Kateeva says that this was achieved by three major technical breakthroughs: is features a production-worthy pure nitrogen process chamber, which doubles the lifetime in certain applications, it reduces particles by as much as 10X thanks to a specialized mechanical design and it offers exceptional film coating uniformity with a process window that’s 5X wider than standard technologies.

The EU launched a new project (called ENAB-SPOLED) that aims to use solution-based OLED materials to enable high performing cost competitive OLEDs for the lighting market and to develop a functional luminaire demonstrator. More specifically, the project partners will develop new materials (transport materials, emitters), new optical technologies for light guiding, and also process technologies for solution processing of small molecule and PLEDs.

This 2-year project has a budget of €4 million and is supported by Germany, Austria and the UK. The project partners are Novaled, Cambridge Display Technology, Tridonic, Zumbotel, the University of Durham and the Fraunhofer IAP. More information can be found here.

Researchers from the University of Utah, Bonn and Regensburg developed a new wagon-wheel (or rotelle-pasta) shaped OLED molecule that emits non-polarized (random) light.Those oligomers, or wrapped-up polymers may enable OLEDs more efficient than polymer based OLEDs (PLEDs).

The researchers explain that current poylmer OLED molecules (which are shaped like spaghetti pasta, to continue the same metaphore) emit polarized light. Some of that light get trapped inside the OLED device and this makes it less efficient. They say that up to 80% of the generated light may be trapped in the OLED because it is polarized.