Interviews with OLED market leaders

The SID DisplayWeek 2020, the premier event for the display industry, will take place in San Francisco (June 7-12). The OLED-Info team will attend this event, and we are happy to present this interview with Sri Peruvemba to discuss the upcoming event. Sri is a good friend and a board director and VP at SID.

Thanks for your time Sri - as Chair of Marketing at SID, please can you tell us a bit about DisplayWeek 2020?

I am proud to say that SID’s DisplayWeek is still the world’s most respected show on electronic displays, touchscreens and related materials. Everyone in the industry has a presence. The show has been growing for the past few years and last year we had a record attendance of over 8,000 people from all over the world. Factoring in global business and political environment, we expect DW2020 to be another record year evidenced by paper submissions, awards submissions, over 90% of the floor space sold out (we had expanded both floor space and meeting rooms), offers to sponsor various events and other factors.

German TADF developer Cynora presented its latest blue TADF material in May 2018 - with a CIEy of 0.14, EQE of 20% and a lifetime of 20 hours LT97 at 700 nits. Cynora expects to have blue material in the mass production by 2020.

Cynora's Chief Marketing Offer, Dr. Andreas Haldi was kind enough to answer a few questions we had regarding TADF emitters, the differences between next-generation emitter technologies, lifetime, color points and more.

UK-based SmartKem is developing a new class of flexible high-mobility p-type semiconductor inks for flexible displays. The company recently made headlines as it started its commercialization phase and announces advances in its collaboration projects with OLED producers in Asia.

SmartKem's CEO and founder, Steve Kelly, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had on SmartKem's technology and business. Steve is an international business professional with more than 20 years’ experience specializing in technology ventures, particularly early stage. He has extensive experience in Intellectual Property exploitation, VC funding and launching new technology to market.

Q: Steve, thank you for your time and for this interview. Can you first give us an overview of SmartKem’s OTFT technology?

SmartKem’s organic thin film transistor (OTFT) backplanes are designed for both glass and flexible displays. They are compatible with electronic paper displays (EPD), liquid crystal displays (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technologies. Through our sophisticated modelling and simulation, they have sufficient driving capability for OLED and potentially, microOLED displays which offer increased contrast, response times and energy efficiency.

In May 2017 Cynora announced a new blue TADF emitters that achieves a 15% EQE at 1000 nits with an emission peak of 470 nm and a LT97 of > 90 hours (at 700 nits) on a device level. Cynora has stated several times that it aims to commercialize its first highly efficient blue TADF emitter by the end of this year.

According to Cynora, the performance requested from customers is an EQE (at 1000) of over 15%, a lifetime (LT97 at 700 nits) of over 100 hours and a wavelength of 460 nm (color purity FWHM 60 nm).