Blue color

Researchers from Korea's UNIST institute, together with colleagues from Sungkyunkwan University have developed a new OLED intermediate layer material (with a highly unusual structure, twisted EBMs with anisotropic molecular arrangements) that significantly improves the brightness, efficiency and lifetime of blue phosphorescence OLED devices.

The researcher report that the new materials enable to reduce the operating voltage of the OLED display, thus enhancing the power efficiency by 24% and the operational stability by 21%. The researchers say that this new material can also be used for in-organic LEDs (including microLEDs).

Researchers from LORDIN, in collaboratioon with researchers from Korea's Dankook University, Gachon University and Hongik University, have reported on a highly efficient and stable ultra-pure blue phosphorescent OLED emitter, based on Lordin's Tetradentate Pt(II) material Complex with a vibration suppression effect.

The researchers say that the new emitter offers a lifetime of 451 hours (LT50 at 1,000 cd/m²), and an EQE of 25.1%. The emission spectrum is extremely narrow - full width at half a maximum of 22 nm. The researchers further developed a tandem OLED device based on this new emitter, which achieves an EQE of 50.3% and a lifetime of 589 hours (LT 70).

Researchers from National Taiwan University, together with colleagues from Yuan Ze University, National Dong Hwa University and Academia Sinica, have developed a very high efficiency blue TADF OLED device, by adopting a favorable horizontal oriented host material.

The researcher designed a new host material (4Ac26CzBz) that is made from acridan and carbazole moieties linked to a benzimidazole core. The host material exhibits a wide optical gap (Eg) and high triplet energy (T1) of 3.3 and 3.0 eV, respectively. The researchers used 4TCzBN as the blue-light TADF dopant, and report a remarkably high device external quantum efficiency of 35.8 % (59.8 cd/A and 62.8 lm/W) and a low turn-on voltage (<3 eV). The device features with significant suppression of the efficiency roll-off, maintaining a high efficiency of 29.7 % as luminance at 1000 cd/m².

During iMID 2024, Samsung Display's eVP Yi Chung said that the company plans to reduce the power consumption of its OLED panels by over 50%. SDC is developing several technologies, each contributing to the same efficiency goal.

SDC did not detail its plans exactly, but it did mention some of the new technologies it is working on - polarizer-free OLEDs (these have been commercialized already), multi-frequency driving (demonstrated by other OLED makers), tandem OLED architecture and the adoption of high efficiency blue PHOLED emitters.

A report from Korea says that LG Display has successfully developed an OLED panel that is based on a blue phosphorescence emitter. The blue PHOLED, provided by Universal Display, offers 100% IQE, up from 25% used by current fluorescence emitters. This will result in around 20-30% power saving for the display itself (depending on the images shown).

UDC has been developing blue emitters for many years, and recently the company said that the development will take a few more months and won't be ready in 2024. The main challenge is increasing the lifetime of the materials. However LG Display has adopted a tandem design to enable a commercially ready display, perhaps even sooner than UDC planned.

Samsung Display's Lee Chang-hee, VP and head of SDC's research center, gave a talk during K-Display 2024, and updated that Samsung is progressing towards a next-generation blue OLED emitter technology in two tracks.

SDC is working with Universal Display, to adopt the company's blue PHOLED system. This is progressing, but SDC says that the pace is slow - indeed we heard from UDC lately that the introduction of a commercial material will take longer than expected.

Universal Display Corporation reported its financial results for Q2 2024, with revenues of $159 million (up 8% from Q2 2023 and a net income of $52 million (up from $50 million in Q2 2023). The company ended the quarter with $879 million in cash and equivalents.

UDC says it believes the OLED market's trajectory is robust, and it is raising the lower end of its annual guidance, now saying that its revenues will be in the range of $645 million to $675 million.

OLED emitter materials are the heart of the OLED device, and the materials that make the most impact on the performance of the OLED display. Most OLED displays utilize red, green and blue emitters.

The efficiency of the current state-of-the-art commercial red and green OLED emitters is excellent - it is in fact close to 100% internal quantum efficiency (IQE) which means that you cannot improve much on the efficiency of the emitter itself (there's still work to be done on getting the light out of the device). Blue OLED emission is a completely different story - current commercial blue emitters suffer from very low efficiency, around 25%. This means that three quarters of the energy goes to waste. Changing to a 100% IQE blue emitter could end up improving the total display efficiency by 20-30%.

DSCC says that the OLED materials market will reach $2.12 billion in 2024, rising 24% over 2023. The market will continue growing at a 6% CAGR until 2028, reaching about $2.7 billion. DSCC details the revenue split between single-stack, tandem and multi-stack panels, saying that materials used in tandem OLED panels will grow at a fast rate of 30% CAGR from 2024-2028. 

The leading materials makers by revenue in 2024 will be UDC, DuPont, LG Chemical and Samsung SDI, holding a market share of 51% together. DSCC says that Chinese materials makers will increase their market share in the future. 

Researchers from the University of Manchester, University of Cambridge and University of Eastern Finland, led by Dr. Alexander Romanov have developed a new deep-blue Carbene-Metal-Amide (CMA) OLED emitter material with promising operating lifetime.

The emitter is based on a a new CMA complex with a rigid amide donor, benzoguanidine. The researcher say that the new design unlocks bright charge-transfer deep-blue emission with 100% photoluminescence quantum yields. The excited state lifetimes of the new CMA complexes are among the lowest reported to date among all TADF emitters
(down to 213 ns), resulting in remarkably fast radiative rates of up to 4.7 × 10 6 s⁻¹ .