March 2008

Digitimes reports that CMEL is expected to move in equipment for the second AMOLED line in September.

CMO's board of directors on Tuesday announced a decision to increase its investment in Chi Mei Electroluminescence, investing a further NT$900 million to fund the subsidiary's second AMOLED panel line.

CMEL can produce AMOLED panels as large as 4.3 inches, and 4.3-inch panels will start shipping in the second quarter. Currently, its major product lines are 2.2-2.8-inch AMOLED panels, with an average yield of 70%.

Its existing production line has a monthly capacity of 150,000 units, with a goal to ramp it up to 250,000 units.

Read more here (digitimes)

Ken Dulaney from Gartner says that the next geneneration of iPhones will have an OLED display. It's only a rumor - he said he overheard it in Asia.

Read more here (Gizmodo)

Earlier this week OLED-Info has been moved to a new server. Our traffic is getting higher all time - and we needed a better server. OLED panels are (slowly) getting larger and better, and more common in mobile phones and MP3 players. Sony's XEL-1 TV announcements also drew a lot of traffic to the site.

Will 2008 be the year of the OLEDs? 

Samsung Electronics has acquired the IP assets of Clairvoyante Inc, an IP licensing company responsible for the development of PenTile subpixel rendering display technology and associated gamut mapping algorithms. The IP includes extending the lifetime of high-resolution mobile OLED displays.

Lighting utilizing OLED could benefit from printing as a manufacturing technique because it can add to its cost effectiveness, says a new report from NanoMarkets, an industry analysis firm.

OLEDs have advantages over other lighting technologies because they combine high brightness with an ability to be fabricated on a thin, flexible display. These are properties that open up opportunities for OLED lighting in architectural lighting, vehicular lighting, and other areas says NanoMarkets. With the improvements in functional printing and the arrival of small molecules inks, it is likely that a higher proportion of OLEDs will be printed because of greater cost effectiveness, states the report. NanoMarkets projects that OLED and other printed lighting markets could possibly reach almost $2.5 billion in the next seven years.

About the report: As new opportunities rapidly emerge in energy efficient solid-state lighting, new manufacturing approaches are also assuming more importance and these include printing. Electroluminescent (EL) lighting has been printed for years, but this report goes beyond EL and includes discussions of other forms of printed lighting, including systems based on carbon nanotube emissions and especially on OLEDs. The report, Printable Electronics Market Outlook: Printed Lighting, reviews the market potential for all of the main applications for printed lighting from simple backlighting applications to sophisticated architectural lighting. It also provides data on the performance criteria for printed lighting and profiles some of the leading firms and government projects exploring printed lighting technology, discusses recent events in this field. Finally, it provides an eight-year market forecast of the revenues that NanoMarkets expects from printed lighting with break outs by both technology and applications segment.

Chinese chemists have discovered a soluble and simple-to-make iridium complex that boosts the efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). This discovery could simplify the manufacture, and reduce the cost, of OLEDs for a wide range of future applications.

A team led by Biao Wang at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China, has solved these problems by developing a new iridium complex that is both easy to make and highly soluble, potentially allowing it to be sprayed onto a surface.

The secret to the solubility lies in the choice of ligand: sterically-hindered phenolic groups. The researchers report that their complex, which combines iridium with three phenyl phthalazine-derived ligands, was 'unexpectedly' synthesised under mild conditions with no catalysts, simply from iridium chloride.

LG Chem and Universal Display Corporation today announced that they have signed a non-exclusive joint development agreement to accelerate the commercialization of high-performance OLED materials for use in OLED displays and lighting products. The collaboration will focus on combining LG Chem's electron transport and hole injection materials with Universal Display's phosphorescent OLED emitter materials and technology.

Universal Display's proprietary PHOLED technology offers up to four times higher efficiency than conventional OLED technology - a feature that is very important for today's battery-operated cell phones and other portable devices, as well as for tomorrow's large-area TV's and solid-state lighting products.

Dr. Karsten Heuser, Director of OLED Lighting Technology at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, is pleased with the excellent intermediate results. Our development team has reached a real milestone for warm white OLEDs with efficiency of 46 lm/W (CIE of 0.46/0.42 measured in the integrated sphere) and a 5,000-hour lifetime, at a brightness of 1,000 cd/m². With these significant increases, flat OLED light sources are approaching the values of conventional lighting solutions and are therefore becoming attractive for a wide variety of applications.

The color rendering index (CRI) of the almost 100 cm² prototype is 80. By March 2009, OSRAM researchers expect that a demonstrator for an energy-saving flat OLED light module comprising several tiles will be able to deliver an overall luminous flux of 500 lm from a power consumption of less than 10 W.

With their pleasant diffused light the color of which can be individually controlled OLEDs will enhance premium lighting design elements such as light tiles that can be attached to any surface. OLED light sources will be particularly welcome where their special properties as flat light sources offer a high quality of light and make a real impression in illuminated wall coverings, atmospheric canopies of light, and light partitions. For widespread applications it will be necessary to produce efficient OLEDs in large numbers at reasonably low cost an essential objective of the OPAL research project.

This breakthrough achievement in OLED lighting is a result of the OPAL research project (Organic Phosphoresce Diodes for Applications on the Lighting Market), an initiative launched by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and coordinated by OSRAM.

Smarthouse claims that Toshiba delayed their OLED TV because of their high power consumption. If you check Sony's XEL-1 you see that the power consumption is higher than LCD or plasma. Sony admits that it will take time for them to lower the consumption - and that's only one of the tasks before their engineers before we get a commercial large sized OLED TV.

Toshiba says they want to produce only efficient TVs - in any technology, so OLEDs had to be delayed.