In July 2014, Taiwan launched the OLED Lighting Commercialization Alliance (OLCA), with an aim to make Taiwan an important OLED lighting player. The OLCA is headed by ITRI institute, and today we hear reports that ITRI is going to recruit OLED engineers to boost the development of OLED technologies.

ITRI will recruit engineers in device design, production management, evaporation process, packaging, lighting module/system and production equipment. The OLCA alliance include members such as Merck, RiT Display, WiseChip, Corning, Tongtai Machine & Tool and the TLFEA (Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association).

Taiwan's ITRI institute transferred its flexible substrate material technology (FlexUP) to a new spin-off startup called FlexUP Technologies, that will commercialize this technology for flexible displays and sensors. The FlexUP material can withstand high temperatures (which makes it well suited for the automotive and medical markets) and can be used in current production lines. ITRI says that FlexUP is expected to raise over NT$1 billion (over $32 million USD).

ITRI recently demonstrated several new AMOLED prototypes - a 6" full-color foldable OLED, a flexible AMOLED with integrated on-cell capacitive touch and a monochrome panel that can be tri-folded both in-wards and outwards (this is shown in the video above).

Taiwan's ITRI institute demonstrated several new AMOLED prototypes at Touch Taiwan 2014. First up, is Taiwan's first foldable AMOLED, a 6" full-color panel that can be folded inwards over 10,000 times.

The 6" panel can be folded to a radius of 7.5 mm. The whole panel is just 0.1 mm thick and it was developed with ITRI's own FlexUPD technology which can be used to turn an existing OLED glass line to produce polyimide-based flexible panels.

Update: the first video was removed from YouTube and is no longer available

Winstar, a leading PMOLED producer from Taiwan, hosted a seminar in June 2014, and they gave two OLED lectures - describing their OLED products in the present and the future development expected from Winstar.

There's some interesting details in there. First of all, while Winstar is currently producing glass-based PMOLEDs, the company is also developing flexible PMOLED panels. One of the major challenges is encapsulation and Winstar is using ALD technology for this at the moment, developed in collaboration with ITRI.

The OLED Lighting Commercialization Alliance (OLCA) was formed a few days ago in Taiwan, with an aim to make Taiwan an important OLED lighting player. The alliance will promote OLED technologies and will include members from materials suppliers to product makers.

The OLCA seems to be led by Taiwan's ITRI. Other members include Merck, RiT Display, WiseChip, Corning, Tongtai Machine & Tool and the TLFEA (Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association). ITRI says that more than 60 companies have shown interest in collaborating with OLCA members.

Taiwan's ITRI institute developed a new technology (which they call Image Lighting) that enables OLED lighting to be patterned with grayscale images (static of course - this is not an OLED display as such).

ITRI says that their technology allows for more than 200 levels of grayscale, which results in great photo quality. ITRI's process is easy and scalable and will fit nicely within a normal OLED lighting production process. ITRI also plans to develop the technology further to enable full color image lighting panels.

Corning recently announced the new second-gen Lotus XT high-performance glass suitable for OLED displays. The company has been supplying glass substrate and cover glass for OLED displays for years now. Now Corning was kind enough to participate in a Q&A session here on OLED-Info to better explain how they see the OLED market and what the future holds for Corning and OLEDs.

We talked to two Corning executives. John Bayne is Corning's High Performance Displays VP and General Manager, while Harrison Smookler is the commercial director and program manager of Willow Glass Substrates (flexible glass).

Corning says that it will take at least 3 years before we'll start seeing flexible displays based on its Willow glass. Corning sent samples of this glass to companies back in June 2012 hoping that products will arrive in 2013, but it seems that manufacturers find it hard to adopt their processes for the flexible glass.

Willow glass (announced during SID 2012) is an ultra-slim (50 um and 100 um) flexible glass that can support backplanes and color filters in both LCD and OLED panels. Willow glass can withstand temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius, and can be used in R2R production processes (ITRI developed a full R2R process with Corning).

Taiwan's ITRI institute says that OLED TV shipments will outpace UHD ones by 2015. While in 2013 only 50,000 OLED TVs will be sold (compared to 500,000 UHD ones), in 2015 OLED TV shipments will rise to 3.24 million compared to 3.2 million UHD TVs. In 2017, ITRI sees over 10 million OLED TVs sold compared to only 6 million UHD TVs. It's not clear how they count UHD OLED TVs...

ITRI explains that the dramatic OLED TV market increase forecast is based on improving yield rates and more companies joining the OLED TV market. UHD on the other hand is limited because it's only useful in panels 50" or above (which is not entirely true. Panasonic for example unveiled a 4K 20" tablet display which they will start producing soon).

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) claims that Taiwan can still compete with Korean panel makers (Samsung and LGD) in the flexible AMOLED market. The institute says that help from the Taiwanese economics bureau will be required. Upstream suppliers will need to ramp up their development effort and boost production facilities and materials.

Samsung had plans to release their first plastic-based flexible OLEDs in 2012, but this has been delayed to early 2013. LG Display hopes to start flexible OLED production towards the end of 2013.