Idemitsu Kosan said they have signed an agreement to acquire a 32.73% stake in Global OLED Technology. Global OLED Technology is owned by LG, and this company has over 2,000 OLED patents (LG created this company when it bought Kodak's OLED business back in December 2009).

Update: Nikkei.com reports that the deal is estimated at "several billion yen" (a billion yen is about $11 million). This makes sense, as LG originally bought the whole patent portfolio for $100 million.

Idemitsu Kosan is showing some new OLED lighting prototypes using their own fluorescent and phosphorescent OLED materials. Phosphorescent OLEDs are more efficient than fluorescent ones. In the following photo, the panel on the left has a high-color temperature, and uses both fluorescent and phosphorescent materials (it is targeted mainly for the EU market). The other 3 panels use just fluorescent materials, and have a low color temperature.

Idemitsu has already commercialized their red phosphorescent, and almost commercialized the green one. They still do not know when they'll be able to release a blue color material, currently the lifetime is about 10% of what the clients need.

Here's the data sheet for the OLED materials, where you can see the lifetime and efficiency of each color:

LG Display says they have signed an agreement with Japan's Idemitsu Kosan for OLED materials. LG sees OLEDs growing rapidly, and they want a stable source for materials.

Idemitsu Kosan are also working with Sony and UDC on OLED display materials.

LG display plans to start making larger panels towards the end of 2009, and to sell OLED TVs in December 2009 or January 2010 in Korea. They expect the market to reach over 3B$ in 2010 (citing DisplaySearch numbers).

The Japanese government will team up with several Japanese companies to develop key-technologies for producing large-size OLED panels. The aim is to cut the development cost for the Japanese companies, to be better able to compete against Samsung and LG, and the Japanese government will pitch in around 32$M.

The project will also try to make the displays more efficient and have longer lifetime.

One report says the project will run till 2013, another that it will run until 2015, and the aim is to produce 40" OLED TVs by then. We'll have to wait and see...

The companies include -

• Sony
• Toshiba
• Matsushita
• Sharp
• Idemitsu Kosan
• Sumitomo chemical
• Dainippon Screen Mfg
• Shimadzu
• Hitachi

Interesting to see Sharp in there, after having stated that "OLEDs will not threat LCD for at least a decade".

Idemitsu Kosan and Sony announced the achievement of 28.5% internal quantum efficiency (IQE) in deep blue fluorescent OLED devices, the world's highest level of luminous efficiency for this technology.

This ground-breaking development is a result of Idemitsu's advanced OLED material technologies and Sony' OLED device expertise, brought together by the two companies' joint development agreement (established in November 29th, 2005). This joint agreement has led to the development of a wide range of high-performance OLED materials that have been incorporated in Sony products, and going forward both Idemitsu and Sony will also consider various practical applications for this newly developed, world-leading blue OLED technology. 
 
Previous fluorescent OLED devices were limited to a maximum 25% IQE, however the implementation of new carrier transport materials and optimized device structure has led to the achievement of 28.5% IQE. Furthermore, the use of Sony's proprietary "Super Top Emission" OLED device technology has enabled blue color deepness (CIE chromaticity: 0.137, 0.065) exceeding NTSC standards to be achieved. 
 
With this technology significantly reducing the driving current of blue OLEDs, the most energy-intensive of the three primary RGB colors, it is expected to significantly reduce the power consumption of OLED panels, contributing to the future development of large-size OLED TVs.

Idemitsu Kosan and Universal Display Corporation today announced that they have signed an agreement to extend their collaboration to accelerate the development of phosphorescent OLED materials for use in displays fabricated through dry processing methods, such as vacuum thermal evaporation. The agreement expands the collaboration into red and green phosphorescent OLED materials, in addition to the blue materials that the two companies have been collaborating to develop since December, 2006.

In order to further expand the market for phosphorescent OLED devices, blue phosphorescent OLED materials need to be more fully developed and the quality and lifetime of red and green phosphorescent OLED materials should continue to improve. Therefore, Idemitsu Kosan and Universal Display have agreed to extend their collaboration into red and green phosphorescent OLED materials, in addition to continuing their work together on blue phosphorescent OLED materials. The collaboration is focused on matching Universal Display’s phosphorescent emitters with Idemitsu Kosan’s phosphorescent hosts and other OLED materials. Through this collaboration, both companies expect to improve efficiency and operational lifetime of their respective phosphorescent OLED materials, which in turn should help accelerate the spread of phosphorescent OLED displays and lighting products.

Idemitsu Kosan has been developing OLED materials for middle and large size panels jointly with Sony Corporation (Sony) since 2005, and Universal Display also has been working with Sony since 2001. Idemitsu Kosan and Universal Display expect the results of this collaboration to be utilized for the OLED material development for Sony products.

An independent administrative institution, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), contracted out the development of technology for OLED lighting as one of its fiscal 2007 projects to Matsushita Electric Works, Idemitsu Kosan and Tazmo.

The contracted companies aim to commercialize the technology in two and a half years from September 2007 through March 2010.

To fortify color rendering properties to more than Ra=90 in particular, the companies will develop a blue OLED material with high color purity, while seeking longer life and higher performance.

Read more here (TechOn)

Ross Young, DisplaySearch's President and Founder says -

The technology behind this product is small molecule OLED material and a CMOS LTPS backplane produced at their joint venture with Toyoda. The red material is the highly efficient phosphorscent type from UDC fabricated by PPG. The blue is likely from Idemitsu Kosan. It is a top emission design which improves brightness, but it also uses a color filter which lowers brightness and makes it even more costly. They went with the color filter along with the RGB OLED materials to meet their color gamut requirements. Samsung SDI, which has a more recent design, is able to achieve the same color gamut without the color filter. We would expect Sony’s next design to either exclude the color filter or go with white OLED material and maintain the color filter which would be bad news for UDC unless they went with UDC’s white material.

Read more here (DisplaySearch blog) 

Idemitsu Kosan is reportedly mass-producing red, blue and green fluorescent materials and provides about 50% of global demand at the current state.

Full-fledged diffusion of organic EL panels is lagging behind predictions by relevant companies, already causing some panel and material manufacturers to retreat from the business. Idemitsu forecasts the worldwide market for organic EL panels will grow to around ¥180 billion in FY2008, but a spokesperson from the company's PR department said, "It is currently very difficult to foresee when the full-fledged diffusion begins. We place our expectations in more employment of organic EL panels for the mobile phone's main display and the generation of the organic EL TV market focusing on medium- to small-size models."

Read more here (TechOn) 

Idemitsu Kosan and Universal Display Corporation today announced that they have signed a non-exclusive collaboration agreement to accelerate the development of blue phosphorescent OLED materials. The collaboration will focus on blue phosphorescent OLED materials for use in displays fabricated through "dry" processing methods, such as vacuum thermal evaporation. The collaboration work will start between Universal Display and Idemitsu Kosan immediately after execution of their agreement.

To date, Idemitsu Kosan has been developing and commercializing mainly excellent fluorescent OLED materials (blue, green and red). Idemitsu Kosan is now supplying these materials to OLED display manufacturers throughout the world. Idemitsu Kosan is especially well-known for its blue fluorescent OLED material, which currently has the top market share in the world.

Universal Display is a leading developer of OLED technologies and materials, and holds basic patents on phosphorescent OLEDs. Many OLED display manufacturers are now evaluating Universal Display's PHOLED(TM) phosphorescent OLED technology and its red and green PHOLED materials, and Universal Display's red PHOLED material is currently being used in commercial production.

With Idemitsu Kosan's valuable experience and accomplishments in the development of blue fluorescent OLED materials, and Universal Display's leadership and pioneering efforts in phosphorescent OLED technology and materials, both companies are optimistic that they will be able to accelerate progress in the area of blue phosphorescent OLEDs through this collaboration.