OLED-Info | OLED industry portal - Page 4

This is the fourth article in our OLED display backplane series. In the previous article, we examined LTPS, the laser-crystallized silicon that finally drove OLED displays. Here, we look at oxide TFTs (IGZO) - a transparent metal-oxide semiconductor with ultra-low leakage and large-area uniformity, the backplane behind big OLED TVs and the new wave of high-resolution IT panels.

Oxide TFTs broke the old choice between cheap-but-slow a-Si and fast-but-unscalable LTPS by using a different kind of material entirely: an amorphous metal-oxide semiconductor. The most famous is IGZO - indium gallium zinc oxide. IGZO itself was first synthesized as a crystalline ceramic material in 1985 by Dr. Noboru Kimizuka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 2004, a team led by Hideo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology invented the first amorphous IGZO TFTs.

IGZO's mobility, around 10 to 15 cm²/V·s, sits neatly between a-Si's ~1 and LTPS's ~100. That is comfortably enough to drive displays a-Si never could, and it comes packaged with two properties that turned out to be transformative.

The OLED emissive materials market grew 7.1% in 2025 to $2.2 billion, according to UBI Research. You would not guess it from the suppliers' financial results, though. Universal Display's material sales fell from $365.4 million to $353.0 million over the same year, and then dropped 25% year-on-year in Q2 2026 to $66 million. DS Neolux's revenues have gone nowhere in five years: 191 billion Won in 2021, 164 billion Won in 2023, and back above the 2021 level only in 2024. The company's headline 62% jump in 2025 came from consolidating a nuclear pump and gas compressor maker, not from OLED.

Solus Advanced Materials' OLED segment was flat at about $86 million across 2024 and 2025, then fell 15% in Q2 2026. Hodogaya Chemical reported OLED sales below plan for its year ending March 2026. The market grew; the established suppliers did not.

Visionox reported its financial result for the first half of 2026. Visionox's revenues were 4 billion RMB ($595 million USD), down 2.85% from last year. The company said that this decline was due to a weak consumer smartphone market, declining panel prices and rising component prices. 

Visionox's net loss in the first half reached $260 million, up 56.5% from 2025. The company continues to invest heavily in R&D and next-generation technologies, and its R&D investment increased 15% from 2025. We have recently posted a spotlight article on Visionox, with the company's history, production capabilities, OLED products, financial performance - and roadmaps.

Researchers from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, led by Prof. Oleg Dimitriev, have performed a study on the influence of the active size and temperature of TADF OLED emitters on the final OLED device performance.

Typically, temperature significantly impacts the performance of OLEDs as these devices degrade as they heat up. However, in TADF emitters, there's actually a remarkable increase in electroluminescence up to one order of magnitude, depending on the applied voltage, as temperature climbs from 18 to 50°C.

Researchers from National Taiwan University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan Ocean University and Academia Sinica used a redesigned C-shaped OLED materials, to create a high-efficiency NIR (1000 nm) OLED device. 

To achieve such a high-efficiency NIR OLED, the researchers replaced a benzene-centered framework with more electron-rich sulfur- and selenium-containing cores. The researchers explain that the stronger electron-rich character promotes intramolecular charge transfer, shifting emission toward 1,000 nanometers, while the rigid C-shaped structure limits molecular relaxation and reduces nonradiative energy loss. The study is published in Advanced Materials.