Technical / Research - Page 52

I visited two companies active with Quantum Dots for displays at SID. First up was Nanosys, which developed their quantum dot enhancement film (QDEF) technology - which dramatically improves LCD color. Nanosys showed a couple of comparisons at their booth of Apple's iPad 2 and an LCD TV - with and without the QDEF film.

The comparison was quite good, and the displays that feature the QDEF films had more vibrant colors. However, compared to Samsung's and LG's OLED TVs, those LCDs were still bland to my taste. But maybe I'm not really being objective here.

RiTdisplay is a PMOLED producer based in Taiwan that has several production lines making PMOLED panels. A few years ago it was considered the world's largest PMOLED maker, although I now hear that due to financial problems the company shut down some of their PMOLED lines (this isn't confirmed though).

At SID 2012, RiTdisplay showed several PMOLED panels, and some 3.5" AMOLED panels. RiTdisplay is Ignis' production partner for its a-Si compensation technology, which basically enables a-Si to be used as a backplane for AMOLED panels (instead of LTPS or Oxide-TFT). This should enable cheaper AMOLEDs. You can read more about this technology at my Ignis-at-SID post.

The UK's Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is funding 43 new projects under the ‘Technology Inspired Innovation’ R&D competition. Plastic Logic will participate in two of these projects, both related to OLEDs. The first one aims to develop new high-performance amorphous polymers, and the second called ROBOLED aims to integrate organic thin-film transistors (TFTs) backplanes with OLED frontplanes. Plastic Logic is collaborating with the UK's CPI on this project.

Back in January 2011 Plastic Logic received $700 million in funding from Russia's RusNano fund - to build a mass-production factory for thin, light and flexible plastic-based e-paper displays. The company recently withdrew from the e-reader market, and is now focused on technology licensing.

First-O-Lite has sent us an update regarding their OLED lighting R&D progress. The company have successfully developed a hybrid tandem WOLED lighting device, which features 77.2 lm/W and a CRI of 87.2 (@2090 cd/m²). The CIE is (0.46, 0.42).

The company's Gen-1 production line will be able to produce samples by the end of the year. They are also developing a Gen-2 production line (in a $40 million investment) that will be able to produce "large sized" panels by early 2013. The plan is to use the Gen-2 fab to make small-scale production for early market development.

Mitsubishi Chemical and Pioneer have jointly developed OLED elements produced using a wet coating process for the light-emitting layers. The two companies will establish a testing facility with an aim to commercialize this technology for OLED lighting mass production by 2014.

Mitsubishi's and Pioneer's OLED coating project began in January 2010, and in May 2011 the companies announced that they managed to fabricate a white OLED in which the emissive layer was formed in a coating process. That OLED featured 52 lm/W and a lifetime (LT50) of 20,000 hours (@1,000cd/m² luminance). The new panel produced now features 56 lm/W and a lifetime (LT70) of 57,000 hours (@1,000cd/m² luminance) which is quite an improvement.

AUO was supposed to start producing 4" to 5" AMOLED panels in Q2 2012, but new reports say that AUO's yields are still very low (less than 20%) and so they have delayed mass production to Q3 2012. The same reports suggest that AUO got orders for 4.3" qHD AMOLED panels from HTC and is likely to get orders from Nokia as well.

AUO first AMOLED plant is a Gen-3.5 fab that has a monthly capacity of about 8,000 substrates. The company is also planning to later start producing at their Singapore Gen-4.5 fab (at AFPD). According to the new reports, the company was considering a 5.5-Gen AMOLED fab as well, but isn't likely to go ahead with that plan due to the low yields from the 3.5-Gen fab. Earlier reports suggested that AUO was considering a 6-Gen fab for large size panels (for OLED TVs).

The US DOE announced a new round of solid-state lighting investment (it's the third one since 2010). Of the three projects selected, there's one relates to OLEDs. K-Space Associates were granted $800,000 (out of $1.2 million ) to develop high-precision measurements of OLED layers during mass production using the company's existing optical monitoring technology.

K-Space's tool will measure layer thickness and composition to ultimately improve the efficiency, color, and lifetime of OLEDs. They hope that this development will serve as a platform for future large-scale OLED production facilities.

My first meeting at SID was with Universal Display's Janice Mahon. UDC had some pretty interesting updates for us at SID, and some nice exhibits in the booth as well - only OLED lighting panels, but quite interesting ones. This post will be rather long...

Novaled have developed a new class of n-doped electron transport layer (ETL) materials, suitable for both OLED TV and small mobile display applications. Novaled have developed two new new air-stable dopants (called NDN-77 and NDN-87) and two new host molecules (called NET-164 and NET-142). Combining these different materials can lead to different efficiency, voltage and lifetime in the final display.

Novaled says that the new materials can feature as much as double the lifetime compared to their previous materials.

NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu have jointly developed a transparent OLED panel that is touch enabled on both sides. The companies unveiled a prototype 2.4" QVGA (320x240) panel: