Phosphorescent - Page 10

Universal Display reported its financial results Q4 2016: revenues were $74.6, up 20% from Q4 2015. Material sales were $29.2 million (emitter sales increase 25% over Q3 2016) and Samsung's licensing revenues were $37.5 million. The net income in Q4 2016 was $25.8 million.

UDC's revenues in 2016 reached $198.9 million, up slightly from 2015 ($191 million) - mostly driven by higher royalty and license fees (commercial material sales revenues were lower than in 2015). Net income in 2016 was $48.1 million, and operating cash flow was $80.3 million.

Universal Display announced that the company will invest $15 million in PPG Industries' OLED facility in Barberton, Ohio. PPG will double its commercial production capacity of UDC's phosphorescent OLED emitter materials. The capacity expansion is scheduled to be completed in the third quarter 2017.

PPG Industries and UDC established a strategic relationship in 2000, and PPG is the exclusive producer of UDC's PHOLED emitter materials. In 2013, the two companies opened this OLED production plant in Barbertron as demand for OLED materials increased.

Researchers from Japan's Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) developed a new OLED device architecture that enables efficient, long-lasting and low-drive voltage OLEDs, at practical brightness levels.

The researchers call the new device architecture exciplex-triplet energy transfer, or ExTET. The image above shows the elementary process and its energy state diagram. To create the emissive layer of the ExTET, the researcher took a film with an electron-transporting material (ETM) and a hole-transporting material (HTM) and doped it with a phosphorescent dopant. Direct recombination between the electrons at the LUMO level and the hole at the HUMO level forms a charge-transfer excited complex (exciplex) - and the phosphorescent emission occurs via energy transfer from the exciplex to the dopant.

Universal Display signed a five-year OLED Technology License Agreement and Supplemental Material Purchase Agreement with Tianma Micro-electronics. Under the license agreement, UDC granted Tianma non-exclusive license rights to manufacture and sell OLED display products based on its IPs. UDC will also supply phosphorescent OLED materials to Tianma.

Tianma is currently producing AMOLED displays in low volume in its 5.5-Gen pilot fab in Shanghai (our own sources say that these displays are not commercial yet but will be so by the end of 2016). In May 2016 the company demonstrated flexible and rigid OLED prototypes, including a 5.5" 702p (270 PPI) flexible OLED prototype with a bending radius of 20 mm.

Universal Display announced its financial results for Q2 2016. Revenues reached $64.4 million (an increase of $10.8 over Q2 2015) and net income was $21.8 million. This quarter includes a $33.7 million license payment from Samsung Display. UDC results disappointed investors which expected higher revenue and earnings.

Operating cash flow in the quarter was $36.2 million and the company's cash and equivalents at the end of the quarter were $332 million (down from $395 million in the end of Q1 2016, following the $96 million BASF IP acquisition and the $36 million Adesis acquisition).

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

In early 2016, Kyushu University in Japan spun-off a new start-up called Kyulux to commercialize the TADF emitters developed at the University. A few months later, Kyulux raised $13.5 million (from LG, Samsung, Japan Display and JOLED).

We have met with Kyulux's team at SID 2016, who updated us that the company is progressing fast on the way to commercialize those TADF emitters. The first products to be ready are green and yellow emitters. Kyulux says that its Hyper-fluorescence TADF emitters offer a superior performance compared to PHOLED emitters (in both intensity and color purity) - and they should also be priced lower - so the company aims to provide a viable alternative to UDC's emitters in the near future.

OLED material developer Molecular Glasses announced that its phosphorescent host material was demonstrated to improve the lifetime of OLED devices by up to 1,500%, with external quantum efficiency of 20% and minimal luminance roll-off. This is in comparison to the "state-of-the-art phosphorescent host mCBP".

It is not clear to which host this is compared to, but the company says that these results were obtained following a 96 prototype device experiment that was recently completed at OLEDWorks' DOE approved laboratory.

Researchers from Kyushu University managed to drastically increase the lifetime of TADF OLED emitters - by more than eight times. This was achieved by a simple modification to the structure of the device - putting two thin (1-3 nm) layers of Liq (a lithium-containing molecule) on each side o the hold blocking layer.

The researchers started with a TADF device, in which the lifetime is only about 85 hours (LT95). This is under "extreme brightness" to accelerate testing. With the new design and some extra modifications, the device's lifetime increased to 1,300 hours - over 16 times better than the initial device. This is a great achievement - even though this is not enough for commercialization yet.

Universal Display announced that it signed a collaboration and evaluation agreement with OSRAM. OSRAM will begin to sample UDC's PHOLED OLED materials for OLED lighting applications.

OSRAM is mostly focused on OLED for the automotive market, and the company recently announced a five-year strategic plan that includes a €2 billion investment in current and future lighting applications - which includes OLEDs for the automotive market. The company's CEO considers OLED important for some niches, but too expensive for general lighting.