Phosphorescent - Page 18

Universal Display reported their financial results for Q3 2012. Revenues were $12.5 million (down from $21.8 million in Q3 2011). Net loss was $5.5 million (compared to a net income of $6.0 million in Q3 2011). UDC lowered their 2012 revenue forecast to be in the range of $80 to $82 million (previous expectations were $90 million to $110 million). This is obviously very disappointing, and UDC shares dropped about 40% after market (after falling 12% during the day).

So what went wrong?

The major setback from UDC's point of view is that Samsung Display did not adopt green emitter and host materials as expected. UDC still thinks SD will adopt green, probably early next year. Samsung is still using UDCs red PHOLED material, but they didn't add more production capacity and so red emitter sales are rather flat (although when compared to 2011, red emitter sales grew 89%) - and will probably continue to be so in the near future.

Universal Display announced that it has contracted Duksan Hi-Metal to produce OLED host materials in Korea. The two companies have entered into a "master services agreement". The first initiative under the new agreement is to provide manufacturing services for "one of Universal Display’s host products for certain Korean customers". This is most likely a green host material for Samsung Display.

Samsung is already using UDC's green emitter and host materials in some OLED displays (the PSP Vita and the Motorola Droid RAZR smartphones) and is set to start using it in more products in the future with an aim to reduce the power consumption of its OLED displays. Having a green host manufacturer in Korea will enable UDC to lower the price of its material, and it's always good to have a 2nd supplier (all of UDC materials are currently produced by PPG Industries).

Update: I just talked to DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira, and he says that the power-consumption test was done on an all-white screen. This is the worst-case scenario for an OLED, and so real-world results will be better (depending on your typical phone usage of course). 

DisplayMate posted an interesting and comprehensive comparison between the iphone 5 IPS-LCD and the Super AMOLED HD display used in the Galaxy S3. They say that the iPhone's display is superior - its a very accurate display, and it's the best Smartphone display they have ever seen. It's actually quite an improvement over the display used in the iPhone 4S.

DisplayMate says that the OLED display on the S3 is not as bright as the LCD, it is less readable in high ambient lighting, it has saturated green and distorted and exaggerated colors. They still complain about Samsung not calibrating the color gamut. On the other hand, they say that OLED is a new technology and hasn't been refined to the same degree as LCDs yet. They still say OLEDs have a very promising future.

The three-year long NEMO (NEw Materials for OLEDs from solutions) project has been successfully concluded. Merck, the project's leader, says that the new soluble materials developed in the project can now be used in large-area OLED display and lighting panels. The new phosphorescent materials have an increased lifetime (200,000 hours for green) and efficiency (70 cd/A @ 1,000 cd/m²).

NEMO was a large €29 million project, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project's scope included emitter materials, charge transport materials and new adhesives for reliable encapsulation of each OLED component. The partners also performed physical tests on the materials and on the OLED components in order to gain more in-depth knowledge for future material developments.

Google's Motorola announced two new smartphones today, both with OLED displays. The first is the Droid RAZR HD, an Android V4 smartphone with a large 4.7" 720p HD Super AMOLED display, a 1.5Ghz CPU, 8mp camera, 16GB of memory, NFC and a large 2,500mAh battery. There's also a Maxx version which has more memory (32GB) and a larger battery (and a slightly larger size of course). The Droid RAZR HD will launch towards the end of 2012.

The second phone is the RAZR M, an LTE smartphone that features a 4.3" qHD (960x540) Super AMOLED Advanced display, Gorilla Glass, dual-core CPU, 1GB RAM, 8mp camera and 8GM of storage memory (and a microSD slot). The RAZR M will ship in September 2012 for $99 on Verizon.

Universal Display reported their financial results for Q2 2012, with a record revenues of $30 million (up 167% compared to 2Q 2011). This includes the $15 million license payment from Samsung (paid twice a year). Net income was $11 million. UDC says that the number of customers purchasing OLED materials increased about 40% from 2Q 2011. Following are some notes from the conference call (during which Steve Abramson, UDC's president and CEO, mentioned OLED-Info four times):

Fujiflim's OLED IP acquisition

Regarding the recent $105 million purchase of Fujifilm's OLED IP portfolio, UDC says that half of these patents relate to device architecture, and the rest covers OLED materials - host, transport and phosphorescent emitters (including iridium and platinum). The company does not expect the patent purchase to generate revenue (in license or material sales) in the near term.

Universal Display announced that it is buying Fujifilm's entire worldwide OLED patent portfolio - over 1,200 OLED patents and patent applications for $105 million. UDC will not only strengthen its existing OLED patent portfolio, but will also "explore new and exciting areas of OLED materials and product development for the future". Fujifilm will supply their highly functional materials (barrier films, conductive films, flexible substrates and more) to OLED makers. In the future the two companies intend to strengthen and enhance this alliance.

Fujifilm has been involved with OLED R&D for over 10 years, and have developed "promising new technologies in OLED materials as well as devices using such materials". We don't have a lot of information about those patents, besides the fact that they revolve around Platinum based phosphorescent OLEDs, blue phosphorescent materials and device structures.

Universal Display have entered into a three-year strategic alliance with Plextronics to develop and commercialize soluble OLED material systems. The new OLED systems will use combine Plextronics' HIL and HTL materials with UDC's PHOLED emissive materials. UDC also made a $4 million investment in Plextronics.

UDC and Plextronics were already collaborating before. Back in November 2010 Plextronics said that UDC's P2OLED system uses their HIL materials and OC NQ Ink.

Lumiotec announced new "natural white" OLED lighting panels (P06 panels) that feature the world's highest color rendering index (Ra93*1, a CRI of over 90). This is very close to natural light, and Lumiotec targets high-end retailers and museums. The panels come in five different sizes (up to 14.5x14.5 cm in size) and cost between ¥13,000 ($165) and ¥40,000 ($508).

The panels feature an efficiency of 28 lm/W, and Lumiotec told us that they use a hybrid design, comprising of both fluorescent and phosphorescent materials (provided by UDC). We do not know what is the exact mix. Lumiotec signed their license agreement with UDC back in April, and are already producing pure-phosphorescent panels, the P5, which feature 40 lm/W.

Sony released 0.5" 1024x768 (2,560 ppi, 9.9um pixel pitch) and 0.7" 1280x720 (2,098 ppi, 12um pixel pitch) OLED microdisplays back in August 2011, and now they gave some interesting details about the technology used to fabricate those panels. The 0.5" OLEDs are used in several 'A' class digital cameras, and the 0.7" microdisplays are used in the HMZ-T1 HMD device.

We already know that the microdisplays use white OLEDs with RGB color filters (all OLED microdisplays on the market use this architecture, although eMagin are working on direct-emission ones). Sony are using stacked RGB fluorescent materials. They say they did not choose red and green PHOLEDs because of lifetime, reliability and cost considerations.