Phosphorescent - Page 12

During an investor conference call, Universal Display revealed some new details on LG Display's flexible OLED program. According to UDC, LGD's current production capacity in its 4.5-Gen fab is 14,000 monthly substrates, more than double its capacity (6,000 substrates/month) that was reported in the middle of 2014.

LGD indeed said they expect to double their capacity towards the end of 2014, and that's great news. Some of that capacity will go to LG's own flexible products (such as the G Flex 2 and the G Watch R) - and reportedly also to support Apple's Watch which will launch in April.

Universal Display and LG Display signed a new long-term OLED technology license agreement and supplemental material purchase agreement. The agreement runs till December 31, 2022.

Similarly to UDC's agreement with Samsung (signed in 2011), LGD gets non-exclusive license rights to manufacture and sell OLED displays, and will pay license fees and running royalties on its OLED product sales. UDC will also continue and supply phosphorescent materials for LG Display.

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.

According to a news report from Japan, Kaneka developed a new OLED panel that achieves a lifetime of 50,000 hours, almost double from the company's current OLEDs. The panel is 8x8 cm in size and 1 mm thick.

Kaneka has a small production line with an annual capacity of about 20,000 panels. The company plans to expand the production capacity with an aim to halve the manufacturing costs. Kaneka plans to achieve OLED sales of ¥50 billion (around $450 million) by 2020.

Researchers from the University of Michigan developed a new phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED) emitter that extends the lifetime by a factor of 10. Researchers have been trying to develop an efficient, long-lasting blue PHOLED emitter for years now, and this may be the breakthrough everybody's been waiting for.

OLED makers SDC and LGD already use red and green PHOLED emitter materials in their OLED panels. While phosphorescent emitters do not last as long as fluorescent emitters, they are much more efficient. All commercial OLED displays currently use a fluorescent blue emitter as the best PHOLED blue to date only lasted for a few hundred hours.

Update: the first video was removed from YouTube and is no longer available

Winstar, a leading PMOLED producer from Taiwan, hosted a seminar in June 2014, and they gave two OLED lectures - describing their OLED products in the present and the future development expected from Winstar.

There's some interesting details in there. First of all, while Winstar is currently producing glass-based PMOLEDs, the company is also developing flexible PMOLED panels. One of the major challenges is encapsulation and Winstar is using ALD technology for this at the moment, developed in collaboration with ITRI.

When Samsung launched the Galaxy S5, DisplayMate tested the new display (a 5.1" FHD, 432 PPI, Super AMOLED) and found it to not only be the best mobile display ever tested at Displaymate, but also 27% more efficient than the 5" Full-HD one on the GS4. Samsung told DisplayMate that the improvement mostly came from more efficient OLED materials, but they never told us which materials exactly.

During a recent investors conference, Universal Display revealed that the GS5 uses their new red emitter material, and the company says that "Samsung attributes the increase in power efficiency" to the new emitter. This is rather surprising as I wouldn't have thought a new red emitter can effect the power efficiency of the whole display so dramatically.

Universal display posted their financial results for Q2 2014. Revenues were $64.1 million, including a $25 license payment from SDC (up from $49.9 million in Q2 2013). net profit was $20.4 million.

Material sales reached $35.9 million - $13.2 million from green host sales, $15 million for green emitter sales and $4.4 million for red emitter sales. Sales to LG Display reached $9 million (a little bit lower than in the first quarter). Sales to Samsung were somewhat "soft", but this was offset by sales to other partners.

A couple of months ago, Samsung release the Galaxy S5 LTE-A, that sports the company's latest AMOLED panel - a 5.1" QHD (2560x1440) Super AMOLED. Anandtech posted a long review of this new phone, and they find that the display is actually a little bit more efficient than the 5.1" FHD panel used in the GS5, even though it sports a higher resolution (which usually means a less efficient display as the aperture ratio gets smaller.

Anandtech further says that Samsung told them they switched to a new, improved emitter material for the new QHD panel, which explains the increased efficiency. This is interesting as the QHD display was released only a few months after Samsung started producing the FHD panel, which by itself was 27% more efficient than the previous generation panels - also due to more efficient OLED materials.

Three weeks ago, Seeking Alpha published my first article on Universal Display, titled "Universal Display: 20X Jackpot In 2018?" - in which I presented my best-case scenario for the OLED market (and UDC) in 2018.

I think the article was received well, and today SA published my second article - "Universal Display's Second Key Customer Is On Its Way". In this new article I explain why Samsung Display is such an important customer for UDC - and how I expect in that in the coming years UDC will diversity its key customer base as I expect LG Display, Konica Minolta, Everdisplay, BOE, Philips and LG Chem to start mass producing OLEDs soon.