BASF New Business

A few days ago OLEDWorks announces its new OLED lighting series, the Brite 3 OLEDs, which include OLEDWorks' first flexible OLED lighting panels, branded as BendOLEDs.

BASF's Coatings division announced that OLEDWorks uses the company's flexible barrier solutions in its Bright 3 family of OLED panels (both flexible and rigid). OLEDWorks uses BASF materials as planarization layer to enable highly reliable thin-film encapsulation.

Ten Germany-based companies established a new OLED lighting alliance, called the "OLED Licht Forum" that aim to develop and promote OLED lighting technologies through dialogue and expert exchange. The forum will also organize conferences, lectures and institution visits.

The forum was founded by OLEDWorks, OSRAM, Merck, BASF coatings, EMDE, Fraunhofer, Hema electronic, Irlbacher, APEVA and WALO-TL. One of the first activities will be to create an OLED showroom in Germany that will be open to the public.

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.

Last month Japan-based OLED material maker Idemitsu Kosan announced that it has decided to expand the OLED material production capacity at it's Korean subsidiary Idemitsu Electronic Materials Korea. Idemitsu now announced that it plans to establish a new OLED materials development company in Switzerland.

Idemitsu says the new company will be established "in order to enhance its development structure in preparation for future growth in demand for OLED materials". Idemitsu has been collaborating with BASF's Switzerland's branch "for some time", and now Idemitsu will hire OLED researchers from BASF (this probably follows Universal Display's acquisition of BASF's OLED IP in June 2016).

Universal Display announced that it acquired BASF's entire OLED IP portfolio, for 87 Euro million (about $96 million). BASF's IP portfolio, representing 15 years of R&D, includes over 500 issues and pending patents around the world in 86 patent families - mostly regarding phosphorescent OLED materials and technologies. BASF’s OLED portfolio has an average lifetime of 10 years.

UDC says that BASF's patents will help the company develop and deliver an all-phosphorescent emissive stack. Specifically, UDC is believing that this will help the company develop commercial blue emissive systems. Including the new BASF patents, UDC will have over 4,000 issued and pending patents

Quantum Dots developer QDVision announced a new $22 million investment round led by Tsing Capital and BASF Venture Capital. QDVision says the funds will be used for further development efforts and to support the company's accelerating growth as QD enhanced LCDs are entering the market.

QDVision also announced a new joint-development agreement with BASF for a QD-enhanced backlight and color filter for LCD displays. For more information on QDVision's technology, hop over to the company's presentation on the OLED Auditorium.

BASF opened a new R&D center for electronic materials at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The new center will focus on materials for next-generation display technologies - specifically OLED displays and flexible displays (OLEDs and e-paper displays).

The new center will support local researchers - and will provide internships and training programs. BASF hopes to team up with local small and medium companies for joint development and marketing.

UK's SmartKem, a developer of high-performance organic backplanes for flexible displays, announced that they completed a 3 Euro million series A funding round from BASF Venture Capital, Octopus Investments, Entrepreneurs Fund and Finance Wales.

SmartKem plans to use those funds to further develop their organic material range and accelerate their technology towards commercialization.

Merck announced that the PrintOLED project successfully concluded. During the project, the partners investigate several technologies (such as gravure, inkjet printing, slot-die coating and others) and were able to demonstrated OLEDs with homogeneously coated active areas of 10 cm² and 27 cm² by classic gravure printing and slot die coating (at least two of the layers were processed from solution).

Merck says that printing two organic layers one on top of the other was a major challenge. The partners achieved significant improvements with specific material sequences. They say that they managed to print with speeds of up to 3 m/s semiconducting OLED layers with a homogeneity meeting the quality standards of industrial-scale OLED production. The knowledge was also applied to OPV and sDSC solar cells.

The European Patent Office (EPO) ruled to upheld one of Universal Display's key PHOLED patents (EPO#EP1394870). This patent, which UDC refers to as EP870, details an OLED in which the emissive layer contains phosphorescent dopant compounds. This patent corresponds to the company's US'238 patent.

In November 2013, the Japanese High Court decided to validate UDC's claims in Japanese patent #4511024, which is a counterpart patent to the EP870 and US238 patents. Later in November, The EPO revoked one of UDC's basic phosphorescent OLED patents, EPO#1449238. The opposing parties included Sumitomo Chemical, Merck and BASF.