We are pleased with the opportunity to expand our relationship with LG Display beyond the Joint Evaluation Agreement we announced in February 2006, said Mary Jane Hellyar, President, Kodak Display Business, and Executive Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company. As we said during our recent investor meeting, OLED is an important technology that will help fuel Kodak’s future growth. Our goal is to see AMOLED panels that have been co-developed continue to appear in the industry during 2008.

AMOLED is the newest generation of display technology and will compete in the full spectrum of size ranges, said Andrew Sculley, General Manager and Vice President, Kodak’s Display Business. AMOLED technology offers superior product performance, and ultimately low-cost manufacturing advantages. We’re proud and pleased that LG Display has chosen to incorporate our OLED technology to power a variety of innovative new consumer display products.

Hyun He Ha, Executive Vice President and Head of Small & Medium Displays Business Unit at LG Display, said, The agreement will help strengthen our small and medium size OLED business, and bolster our position in the large OLED market in the long run. We expect the win-win relationship to create vast synergy for the OLED business of both companies.

The agreement with LG Display is the latest in a series of moves that Kodak has made as the company commercializes its innovative OLED technology. Recently, KAGA Electronics of Japan announced plans to introduce the world’s thinnest, lightest portable 1-Seg television featuring a full-color, 3.0-inch OLED display utilizing Kodak’s AMOLED technology, which includes Kodak’s patented Global Mura Compensation that provides overall yield improvement. The KODAK ELITE VISION AMOLED 1-Seg TV was co-developed by Kodak, LG Display, KAGA Electronics and Andes Electronics and will be available in Japan by the end of March 2008.

For the fourth quarter of 2007, the Company reported a net loss of $3,256,104, versus a net loss of $4,408,826 for the fourth quarter of 2006. The Company’s net loss for the year ended December 31, 2007 was $15,975,841, compared to a net loss of $15,186,804 for the year ended December 31, 2006.

Royalty and license revenues were $354,025 and $828,371 for three months and year ended December 31, 2007, respectively, compared to $127,900 and $2,400,179 for the same periods in 2006. The decrease in royalty and license revenue for the year was attributable to a suspension of OLED display production by a major customer, AU Optronics Corporation, as well as structural differences in the Company’s licensing arrangements with AU Optronics and Samsung SDI Co., Ltd. Under the arrangement with AU Optronics, license revenues were earned when the Company sold materials to AU Optronics, while under the arrangement with Samsung SDI, corresponding royalty revenues are not earned until products incorporating the Company’s materials are sold by Samsung SDI and reported to the Company.

2007 marked a milestone year for Universal Display on a number of fronts, said Sidney D. Rosenblatt, Chief Financial Officer of Universal Display. Our licensee, Samsung SDI, began production and shipment of active-matrix OLED displays that utilize our phosphorescent OLED technology and materials. Recipients of these shipments included a number of major handset manufacturers, and we were encouraged to see that Samsung SDI had ramped volume production by the fourth quarter of 2007. We also continue to see a number of advances in our OLED technologies, with increased performance in our red, green and blue PHOLED material systems. In addition, we continued our work with industry leaders as well as the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Energy, to accelerate growth of the OLED industry and to advance next generation OLED technologies like white OLED lighting and flexible OLED displays.

Mitsubishi Chemical is considering making OLED panels by an ink-jet printing process in order to lower production costs.

The ink-jet process is believed to be more efficient than the existing evaporation coating.

GE Global Research today announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLED lighting devices. This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today.

Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process, said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.

Duggal continued, Beyond OLEDs, this technology also could have broader impact in the manufacturing of other organic electronic devices such as organic photovoltaics for solar energy conversion, sensors and roll-up displays.

For businesses, architects, lighting designers and anyone interested in pushing the envelope to achieve increasingly energy-efficient lighting — and vastly expanded lighting design capabilities — today marks the day that viable, commercialized OLED lighting solutions are coming into view, said Michael Petras, GE Consumer & Industrial’s Vice President of Electrical Distribution and Lighting. We have more work to do before we can give customers access to GE-quality OLED solutions, but it’s now easier to envision OLEDs becoming another high-efficiency GE offering, like LEDs, fluorescent or halogen.

The demonstration of a low-cost, roll-to-roll process for OLED lighting represents the successful completion of a four-year, $13 million research collaboration among GE Global Research, Energy Conversion Devices and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goal of the collaboration was to demonstrate a cost-effective system for the mass production of organic electronics products such as flexible electronic paper displays, portable TV screens the size of posters, solar powered cells and high-efficiency lighting devices.

ECD Senior Vice President Nancy Bacon said, This program was a major step in developing high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing for OLEDs and other organic semiconductor devices. The success of this program is testimony to the effectiveness of NIST’s advanced technology program model, and our 20-year history of pioneering research in roll-to-roll technology. We currently are utilizing this technology to mass produce our flexible, durable and lightweight UNI-SOLAR brand solar laminates. ECD looks forward to continuing collaboration with GE to further develop this technology for future commercialization.

GE researchers provided the organic electronics technology and were responsible for developing the roll-to-roll processes, while ECD provided its unique roll-to-roll equipment-building expertise to build the machine that manufactures the OLED devices. The machine is being utilized for further manufacturing research at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.

The development of this low cost roll-to-roll manufacturing process has the potential to eliminate the manufacturing hurdles that currently exist in preventing a more widespread adoption of high performance organic electronics technologies such as OLED lighting. The unique commercial equipment and technology needed to enable high performance-based organic electronics products does not currently exist. The few organic electronics products on the market today are made with more conventional batch processes and are relatively high cost. A roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that enables high performance and low cost devices will allow a more widespread adoption of organic electronics products.

This is from Art.Lebedev's blog:

"We’re starting to work on a completely new design of Optimus mini. Main direction: to have something like ‘mini Tactus’. One small sensor display divided into three (maybe more) zones.  On the top of our wish list is wireless capabilities (a lot of people use Optimus mini three to control Power Point presentations)"

Even when not plugged directly in to the computer Optimus mini should be able to receive signal. Thus one will be able to have AC-powered wireless PC informer anywhere within the Bluetooth range

Merck expects OLED to complement but not replace liquid crystal technology.

The reality is that OLED will come one day as an additional technology for flat displays. I say this with a lot of confidence," the head of Merck's chemicals business, Walter Zywottek, told Reuters in an interview.

DisplaySearch reports that Samsung SDI drove the market, pushing shipments to 20.2M, which was up 30% Q/Q but down 9% Y/Y. For the year, total revenues grew 6% to US$493.9M (see Table 1) and total shipments grew 8% to 74.7M, according to the DisplaySearch Quarterly OLED Shipment and Forecast Report. The report findings also show that the shipment mix is changing, as AMOLEDs had a 9.7% share of total revenues in Q3’07, which jumped to 41% in Q4’07.

Key findings in the DisplaySearch report include

• Samsung SDI was #1 in total revenue with US$79.4M, more than double the #2 supplier RiTdisplay at US$30.3M.


• RiTdisplay retained its lead in shipments at 6.6M units with Samsung SDI following at 4.9M units.
  
  Pioneer was #3 in units and #3 in shipments.


• Sony shipped 2K 11 displays for use in the XEL-1 in December and is expected to ship 6K panels in Q1’08.


• Chi Mei EL increased its production of AMOLED panels, shipping 60K units in Q4’07 up from 16K in Q3’07.


• LG Display, formerly LG. Philips LCD, took over LGE’s PMOLED fab and is expected to ship ~150K AMOLED panels in Q1’08 for use in the recently announced LG-SH150A.

AMOLEDs are beginning to hit their stride in the small/medium market with Nokia, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson all releasing products in Q4’07. We expect to see multiple product introductions in the next two quarters, and the panel size will jump to 2.6 and larger compared to previously announced 2.2-2.4 models, said Barry Young, a senior DisplaySearch advisor.

Read more here (DisplaySearch) 

Summary:

• Red phosphorescent emitter functions optimally with Novaled’s proprietary technology for highly power-efficient OLEDs


• Delivers lifetime of 50,000 hours at initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm


• Supports market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices

Ciba has developed a deep red phosphorescent OLED emitter that functions optimally in combination with the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, delivering a lifetime of 50,000 hours at an initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm. The new material supports the market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices for display and lighting applications.

We want to provide the market with efficient phosphorescent materials, says Rolf Drewes, Global Head of Business Line Electronic Materials at Ciba. In this project, we are developing the full color range of emitters compatible with Novaled’s proprietary OLED technology. Our deep red, the first to become commercially available, offers customers not only long-lifetime performance but also excellent thermal stability. Green and blue are now in progress.

Phosphorescent emitter materials together with low-voltage devices are mandatory for the future of the OLED industry, and Novaled is very pleased to see a key industry player developing such materials, adds Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled AG. This deep red phosphorescent material provides a long lifetime at a lowest operating voltage of 3.3 V as well as good power efficiency of 8.1 lm/W, making it suitable for displays as well as for completely new lighting applications. OLED technology even has potential to surpass the efficiency of energy-saving bulbs.

Made of thin organic material layers only a few nanometers thick, OLEDs are semiconductors that emit light in a diffuse way to form an area light source. In 2006, Ciba and Novaled entered an industrial collaboration to create organic dopant and transport materials for the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, which enables highly power-efficient OLED performance.

Samsung says they will show a 32" OLED TV at CeBit (4-9, March, 2008).

OLED displays are manufactured from a sandwich of different materials including the electron transport layer. This layer is critical to the efficiency, voltage, and lifetime of the total display based on the electron conductivity performance of the material.

E278ST has been developed as a like-for-like replacement in manufacturing lines for aluminium quinolate (Alq3), the electron transport layer most commonly used throughout the OLED industry.

E278ST provides significant technical and performance benefits compared with Alq3. The new electron transport material has lower toxicity, lower voltage, higher electroluminescent efficiency, longer lifetime and lower voltage drift.

In customer trials, OLED-T has demonstrated a two-fold increase in device lifetime and a 25 per cent reduction in device voltage. A fluorescent red device’s voltage was reduced from 8V to 6V at 500 cd/m2 and showed a 20 per cent power efficiency improvement. Voltage drift was reduced by 25 per cent over the first 500 hours of operation.

The new material is organic and contains no metals. The new material complements OLED-T’s already strong OLED material portfolio.

E278ST offers superior performance as an electron transport material in both passive matrix and active matrix OLED displays compared with existing materials. It can be used as a direct replacement and upgrade path for aluminium quinolate, ensuring that display manufacturers can gain benefits using existing manufacturing processes, said Myrddin Jones, CEO, OLED-T.

OLED-T will begin customer sampling of E278ST from the second quarter of 2008 and will commence volume production from the fourth quarter of 2008. The new material complements OLED-T’s already strong OLED material portfolio.