NanoMarket's upcoming OLED Lighting Markets-2008 will analyze and forecast the rapidly emerging market for OLED lighting and will answer important questions such as which segments of the lighting market will see the first penetration of OLED lighting and when and what are the likely improvements that we will see in lifetimes, luminance and efficiency over the coming years. The report will provide a thorough examination of the OLED lighting business and include an analysis of the latest manufacturing techniques and developments on the OLED materials front as well as a detailed applications market analysis of mobile electronics backlighting the vast general illumination market and large outdoor signage displays. It will also include profiles of the major firms developing OLED lighting and the leading government funded R&D projects around the world that are helping to drive OLED lighting into the market place. Detailed forecasts in volume and value terms will also be included.

Released in July 2007, Emerging Markets for OLED and Printed Lighting provided a complete analysis of the commercial opportunities for electroluminescent, nanotube and OLED lighting used for backlighting, general illumination, specialty/architectural lighting, vehicular lighting, signage and niche applications. The report included detailed eight-year (volume and value) market forecasts as well as strategic profiles of all the leading firms developing and marketing this emerging technology, as well as the activities of government funded projects in the U.S. and Europe.

There are reports that Matsushita has plans to mass produce 37" OLED TVs in 3 years. They want to be the first company to make OLED panels over 30". They also have a suggested selling price - 150,000 yen (~1400$).

The TV will be made by Panasonic in the plant owns by the joint-venture between Matsushita, Hitachi and Canon.

Update: Later on Panasonic denied those plans, saying these are only rumors. 

Although ink-jet (Sumitomo Chemical, Sumation, CDT, etc.), continuous spray (DuPont, Dainippon Screen), roll printing (LG Display, demonstrated for TFT backplanes), and roll-to-roll printing (GE) have gotten most of the attention, there is another, time-tested solution process: slot-coating or extrusion coating, which has been used to apply photoresist, among other things, for decades.

Greg Gibson, CTO of NexTech FAS indicated that the commercial use of slot coating to apply some of the functional coatings used in OLED displays is closer than I would have thought. (NexTech FAS is the operating company for the process equipment companies NexTech Solutions and FAS Holdings Group, which are in the process of merging.)

Slot coaters put down an unpatterned layer of material, so their most obvious application is for OLED lighting and for the unpatterned layers in an OLED display, such as the hole injection layer (HIL) and the electronic transport layer (ETL). Although patterning of multiple organic layers, such as would be required for an RGB display, is difficult, development work is continuing, Gibson said. And patterning of a single layer, as would be required for a color-by-white or monochrome display, is relatively straightforward.

Displays incorporating HIL, ETL, and/or emitting layers applied with slot coaters are likely to appear on the market in 2010, Gibson said. Which layers exactly? Products will incorporate at least two of the three, Gibson answered.

HILs and ETLs are usually apply by thin-film deposition and are very thin. Can slot coaters apply layers that thin? "Our development is to slot-coat very thin layers, and it has taken a combination of equipment and material advancements," Gibson said. "There is a low solids concentration in the wet film, which is fairly thin itself, and then it dries to a thickness of 100 to 200 nm. Although it’s hard to make a direct comparison, that’s in the general range of thin-film deposition. The materials are somewhat different than ink-jet materials because they need to be formulated specifically for slot-coating solution processing."

OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is spearheading the effort to develop cost-effective volume production methods for organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) under the CombOLED project, a European funded research and development project that was conceived to combine new device structures, advantageous manufacturing approaches and less complex materials with the aim to achieve cost effective OLED lighting solutions.

The objective of the CombOLED project, which is being funded by the EU and coordinated by OSRAM, is to create the necessary conditions for introducing the new light sources into lighting applications, said Bernhard Stapp, Head of Solid State Lighting at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. This includes methods for cost-effective printing of new component architectures for large-format transparent light sources. As an innovation driver in the LED market and a pioneer in the mass production of semiconductor components, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors is bringing valuable know-how to the EU project.

Sharp's Miyuki Nakayama : "Organic EL screens like that just aren't a threat to LCD and they won't be for at least another decade. The picture quality is superb, but the screens don't last long and they can't easily be made bigger."

Sharp has "big plans" for LCD TV, and also smaller embedded LCD displays.

According to Korea times, LG Display are planning to invest more in their AMOLED business. They are obviously trying to catch up with Sony and Samsung. Sony have plans to invest over 200M$ in AMOLED production, and Samsung is planning to combine SDI's and Samsung Elec's OLED divisions.

Read more here (Korea times)

At their yearly share holder meeting, UDC reviewed their company's and the OLED industry's progress. UDC also highlights continued adoption of its energy-efficient PHOLED technology in commercial displays and advances in its flexible OLED, white OLED lighting, and printable, phosphorescent P(2)OLED(TM) technologies.

Universal Display’s Chief Executive Officer, Steven V. Abramson, began the meeting by reviewing progress in the commercialization of the Company’s OLED technologies over the past year. Mr. Abramson followed this by highlighting advances in next generation technologies for display and lighting applications, and providing a vision of the future for the Company and the OLED industry.

The last year has seen a number of steps forward for both Universal Display and the OLED industry, Mr. Abramson stated. Our high efficiency, phosphorescent OLED technology is essential for the production of low-power consumption displays. Through commercial agreements with industry leaders, we have seen increasing numbers of active-matrix OLED displays that use our technology, in products that include KDDI, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba cell phones, as well as iRiver and Teclast multi-media players. As the market for smaller-area OLED displays solidifies, the next wave of product applications like laptops, computer monitors and TVs is taking shape. A number of announcements have also been made about an increasing demand for AMOLED displays and plans to expand production capacity to meet this demand. As the market continues to grow, we believe that we are well-positioned to participate in that growth.

Mr. Abramson also highlighted progress in the Company’s core OLED technologies. In addition to reviewing the Company’s 102 lm/W breakthrough in white OLEDs that was reported two days earlier, Mr. Abramson discussed key advances in PHOLED, P²OLED and flexible OLED technologies. He also reported a new blue PHOLED material system, at CIE(0.16, 0.25) with over 15,000 hours of operating lifetime (to 50% initial luminance) at 500 nits, which is nearly double the lifetime reported a year ago.

In addition, Mr. Abramson highlighted a number of exciting prototypes on exhibit at the meeting that demonstrate the Company’s core technologies. These included a flexible OLED display built in collaboration with LG Display and partially supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. Also on display were inkjet-printed samples built using the Company’s solution-processible P²OLED technology and materials, and examples of commercial products with OLED displays from CMEL, Pioneer and Samsung SDI. Other technical advances, including those in the Company’s infra-red OLED and organic vapor-jet printing technologies, were also described.

Mr. Abramson concluded, Today, OLED technology is commercial, offering its benefits to manufacturers and consumers alike. The near future will bring bigger and brighter displays, OLED TVs will become even more common, and our next-generation technologies will continue to be refined and advanced. Our phosphorescent OLED technology offers a real ‘green’ solution for display and lighting applications with its energy efficiency and environmental appeal. We believe that our UniversalPHOLED and other OLED technologies will be at the very core of this progress.

At the end of the project period, the OLLA project consortium presents its final milestone: the basic technology for a white OLED light source, with an efficacy of 50.7 lumens per watt at an initial brightness of 1.000 cd/m² based on the Novaled PIN OLED technology. The OLLA project is a joint basic research consortium, headed by Philips Lighting.

The OLED technology is generating a novel and very attractive class of solid-state light sources, which are flat, thin, and very lightweight. Due to its freedom of design, OLED lighting technology offers many possibilities for new lighting applications achieving substantial energy savings. Within OLLA 24 partners of 8 European countries have been working closely together developing OLED technology for lighting purposes with the goal to reach an efficacy of 50 lumens per watt combined with a lifetime of over 10.000 hours at 1.000 cd/m2 initial brightness.

Philips Research and Novaled, together with the partners reached the project targets in efficacy, color rendering and brightness. The lifetime of the Novaled device even exceeded the promised value by one order of magnitude.

The Novaled PIN technology has the potential to further improve the power efficiency. It’s in line with the technology roadmap that in the near future some 100 lm/W OLEDs will be achievable, adds Dr. Martin Vehse from Novaled.

Collecting all light of the device in a laboratory set-up with a macro extractor, we measure even more than 80 lumens per Watt, comments Dr. Volker van Elsbergen,
Philips Research, the achievement. "This shows that one of the keys to higher efficiencies will be better light outcoupling technologies. \

Besides the record values listed above, the OLLA project delivered the first large sized ITO-free OLEDs, the first large-area printed OLEDs and several ICT demonstrators. All demonstrators were on show last Thursday on a public event in Eindhoven.

Philips, Osram Opto Semiconductors, Siemens, Novaled and Fraunhofer IPMS will continue the development of OLED lighting technology in a follow-up project. Within this new OLED100.eu project, the efficiency, lifetime and size of OLEDs will further increased.

Universal Display Corporation today announced that the company has successfully demonstrated a record-breaking white OLED with a power efficacy of 102 lumens per watt (lm/W) at 1000 cd/m2 using its proprietary, high-efficiency phosphorescent OLED technology.

Just last month at the Society for Information Display Symposium, Universal Display announced a new record of 72 lm/W. Since then, Universal Display has continued to make significant advances in this area achieving yet another major milestone toward commercialization. The milestone also demonstrates the potential of white OLEDs to offer significant energy savings and environmental benefits to end users around the world. For the first time, white OLEDs have surpassed the power efficacy of the two incumbent indoor lighting technologies - incandescent bulbs are less than 15 lm/W and most fluorescent lamps are 60 - 90 lm/W.

Funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through its Solid-State Lighting initiative, Universal Display’s 102 lm/W milestone is a significant achievement toward the DOE's roadmap goal of a 150 lm/W commercial OLED light source by 2015.

This WOLED light source also offers a pleasing white emission with a color rendering index (CRI) of 70 and a coordinated color temperature (CCT) of 3900 Kelvin. This all-PHOLED structure uses complementary materials from Universal Display's collaboration partners at LG Chem and Nippon Steel Chemical Company.

Through the use of Universal Display’s PHOLED technology, power-efficient white OLEDs have the potential to reduce energy consumption dramatically and to lower the amount of by-product heat, which creates additional energy and environmental burdens. White OLEDs are also environmentally benign, especially compared to mercury-containing fluorescent lamps and newer compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). It has been estimated that white OLEDs could worldwide save well over $20 billion in electric costs and over 9 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions from the U.S. alone by 2016.

Samsung SDI and Samsung Electronics are in talks to make a joint venture in OLED displays.

They say they will give more information towards the end June or early July.