Fluorescent

OLED emitters are the key component of any OLED display, as these materials are responsible for the actual light emission. As the OLED industry grew to around $50 billion in yearly revenues, OLED emitter suppliers have enjoyed a growth in demand, and this resulted in increased R&D towards higher performance materials.

Most people will associate the OLED emitter market with Universal Display, and indeed the company is almost a monopoly in commercial phosphorescence OLEDs, both red and green. 

But there's more to the OLED emitter market than just UDC. While the OLED emitter materials market is indeed highly concentrated, with a few key players dominating specific technology segments, there are over a dozen companies, in Japan, Korea, China, the EU, and the US, that develop and produce OLED emitters, based on several different material platforms. In the future, the industry may shape up quite differently that it is today.

In this article we look into the global OLED emitter industry, estimate the market and its future growth, and identify all the relevant material developers (over 25 companies, including early stage companies, pure-play OLED material makers, and large chemical makers, in all major geographies). We also list major OLED host producers, as these materials are highly connected to the OLED emitter in the OLED device stack, and in many times there is confusion regarding the host producer and the actual emitter producer. 

LG Display announced that it has successfully verified the commercialization-level performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels on a mass production line. LG is using a hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure, with blue fluorescence in the lower stack and blue phosphorescence in the upper stack. This enabled LG to achieve a power consumption reduction of 15%, while maintaining a similar level of stability to existing OLED panels.

The blue PHOLED emitter was supplied by Universal Display. LG Display says that it has independently filed patents for its hybrid blue phosphorescent OLED technology in both South Korea and the United States.

Researchers from France's Universite de Rennes and the Université Paris-Saclay have designed new graphene-based OLED emitters that outperform all previous graphene emitters.

The researchers designed green emitters based on rod-shaped nanographene materials containing C60-tBu8 materials, and incorporated these into a benchmark OLED device.  The OLED devices containing the C60-tBu8 exhibited current and power efficiencies (CE and PE) of 2.27 cd·A^–1, 0.28 lm·W^–1 and luminance of 164 cd·m^–2.

Researchers from the University of St Andrews, led by Prof. Ifor Samuel, have designed an OLED based communication device that achieves a record data rate of 3.2Gbps.

To realize this achievement, the researchers developed high-speed red, green and blue emitting OLED devices, on a single substrate. Using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), the three OLED devices are emitting at the same time. By selecting fluorescent materials with nanosecond emission lifetimes and little overlap between their emission spectra, the researchers achieved a -6b dB electrical bandwidth of over 100 Mhz. 

Researchers from Seoul National University (SNU), in collaboration from colleagues from Samsung's SAIT institute, have identified a critical mechanism behind the performance degradation of OLED devices, the interfacial exciton-polaron quenching mechanism.

The researches have theoretically proposed a mechanism where excitons in the light-emitting layer are quenched by the accumulated charges at the interface. They followed with with experiments that have independently observed this phenomenon, identifying three key factors: interfacial barrier, exciton-polaron distance, and exciton lifetime. 

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Osaka University, University of Toyama and Shizuoka University have developed a fluorescent blue (462 nm) OLED device that features an ulta-low turn-on voltage of 1.47 V (at 100 nits). The researchers say this is very low, as similar commercial blue devices typically need around 4 V.

To achieve that low turn-on voltage, the researchers built a new device, as they realize that the choice of materials significantly influences the device's turn-on voltage. The device itself is an upconversion OLED.