OLED-Info: the OLED experts

Truly Semiconductors signed an agreement with the Meishan City government (in Sichuan, China) to establish a joint-venture to construct a 6-Gen AMOLED line. The fab will be mostly used to produce small-sized AMOLED smartphone displays. In addition to the AMOLED line, Truly's new plant will also host a new 5-Gen TFT LCD production line.

Truly estimates that the project will cost a total of 40.4 billion Yuan (almost $6 billion USD). Construction of the AMOLED fab will begin in October 2018, and production is expected to begin in 2021. The cost of the AMOLED fab (which is the second stage in this project, the LCD line will come first) will total $4.1 billion USD. The AMOLED line will use 6-Gen substrates (1500x1850 mm) and will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 substrates (equivalent to over 52 million 5" panels annually).

DSCC expects the OLED market to rapidly grow in the near future, as AMOLED production capacity will increase at a CAGR of 41% from 2016 (5.3 million square meters) to 2021 (29.4 million square meters). OLED revenues will reach $21 billion in 2017 (a rise of 46% compared to 2016) and will reach $46 billion in 2021.

Smartphones are still the largest OLED application by far - with a 86% market share (revenues) in 2017 and 81% in 2021. The second largest application by revenues are OLED TVs, and other applications follow with a small market share - but one that will increase as supply looses in the future. If we look at shipments, then smartphones acount for 94% of OLED shipments, and the 2nd and 3rd applications are VR headsets and smart watches. OLED TV shipments will reach 6.5 million in 2021 (rising at a CAGR of 49% from 2016 to 2021).

In March 2016 the EU launched the PI-SCALE with an aim to create a European-wide pilot line which will enable companies of all sizes to quickly and cost effectively test and scale up their flexible OLED lighting concepts and turn them into market ready products. PI-SCALE members recently managed to produce 10-meter long OLED lighting panels.

The PI-SCALE project now launched a flexible OLED design competition, calling out designers to propose OLED lighting and signage applications that highlight the special features of OLED technology: foldable, twistable, bendable, conformable, transparency, large area illumination.

IHS estimates that flexible OLED production capacity is set to increase from 1.5 million square meters to 20.1 million square meters between 2016 and 2020. That's a compound annual growth rate of 91%!

IHS says that almost all new small-sized displays OLED capacity added in the future will be used to produce flexible OLEDs, which will grow the market share of flexible OLEDs for mobile applications from 28% today to 80% by 2020. In the years between 2016 to 2020, OLED producers in China, Korea and Japan will build the equivalent of 46 new flexible AMOLED fabs (each with 30,000 monthly substrates).

ETNews reports that Cynora is finalizing its latest financing round, with aims to raise €15 million. LG Display will participate in the round, investing $9 million, and Samsung Display is also considering a similar sized investment.

Cynora, based in Germany, is developing OLED emitters, and has recently announced its blue TADF OLED performance. Cynora's new blue achieves a 15% EQE at 1000 cd/m² with an emission peak at < 470 nm and a LT97 of > 90 hours (at 700 cd/m²) on a device level. Cynora says that it is very confident that it can commercialize its first highly efficient blue emitter by the end of this year, as planned.

Hyperfluoresence TADF materials developer Kyulux announced a collaboration with PMOLED maker WiseChip to bring Hyperfluoresence TADF emitter based displays to the market by year's end. Wisechip demonstrated an HF TADF display at the TADF Workshop last week in Fukuoka, Japan.

The PMOLED display shown by Wisechip was a 0.96" monochrome yellow 128x64 one. The demonstration showed how much brighter (or more efficient) the Hyperfluoresence based display is compared to Wisechip's current fluoresent-based displays. The power saving is almost 50%.