In April 2009, Philips started offering OLED lighting panel samples (and was the first company to do so). For over 5 years, Philips shipped many types of OLEDs, but they were still considered a technical gadget. The panels were offered via a special Lumiblade online shop.

Today Philips told me that OLED is now an official "product" of Philips. The lumiblade shop is closed, and the OLED panels will be available via the normal Philips OEM shops. Currently this only so in Europe, but this will soon be true globally. Philips says that "OLED sample time is over" - OLEDs have matured enough to become a real lighting product.

Philips today announced the Lumiblade Innovators Club - a call for 100 worldwide lighting developer partners that will "take OLED lighting to the next level", and invest in the future of lighting.

This innovators club (which costs €5,000 to join) gives access to a special support team and technical advice - and most crucially Philips' marketing and media support. Philips actually wants to make these partners the central subject of its OLED brand campaign.

In November 2013 Universal Display signed a collaboration and evaluation agreement with Philips' OLED lighting unit, under which UDC will start supplying Philips with sample PHOLED materials. Today UDC announced that Philips signed a commercial material supply agreement.

This means that Philips intends to use UDC's materials in commercial OLED lighting products. This is not surprising as it is widely accepted that UDC's PHOLED materials are required to produce efficient OLEDs.

Three weeks ago, Seeking Alpha published my first article on Universal Display, titled "Universal Display: 20X Jackpot In 2018?" - in which I presented my best-case scenario for the OLED market (and UDC) in 2018.

I think the article was received well, and today SA published my second article - "Universal Display's Second Key Customer Is On Its Way". In this new article I explain why Samsung Display is such an important customer for UDC - and how I expect in that in the coming years UDC will diversity its key customer base as I expect LG Display, Konica Minolta, Everdisplay, BOE, Philips and LG Chem to start mass producing OLEDs soon.

Update: It turns out that the researchers did not fabricate an OLED lighting panel, but a small monochrome (green) OLED device.

Researchers from Philips, Graphenea and the University of Cambridge developed a new graphene-based transparent electrode that outperforms ITO in OLED devices.

Graphene by itself is not a good electrode material because the concentration of the charge carriers is low - which means that you need to dope it with excess carriers - while leaving it flexible and transparent. To achieve that, the team used a metal oxide film (molybdenum trioxide, MoO₃) as an intermediate layer between the graphene and the OLED layers. The work was performed as part of the EU project GRAFOL, aimed at roll-to-roll mass production of graphene.

Philips' OLED lighting division has a new head of Marketing and Business Development - Jay Kim. Before he was responsible for OLED product marketing, business development, MarCom and customer services functions globally, Jay headed Philips' industry segment marketing in Europe involving Philips LED luminaries, lighting controls and services. And he was kind enough to agree to this interview here at OLED-Info.

Q: Jay - thanks for your time. Let's jump, shall we? In March 2014 Philips announced the FL300, your brightest OLED yet at 300 lumens. Any updates on this panel? Is it still on track for Q3?

We are very happy with the performance of the new Brite FL300 and its acceptance in the market. Already before official market introduction at Light+Building we have had three designs where the brightest OLED on the market is used. Italian furniture maker Riva1920 uses our OLED in its K BLADE lamp, an exceptional beautiful wooden desk lamp combining 48,000 years old Kauri wood from New Zealand with the world’s most modern lighting technology OLED. Besides that, German Designer Thomas Emde is using the Brite FL300 in its new series of OLED luminaires sold under the label OMLED. In addition, he is working closely together with Italian luminaire manufacturer Luceplan. Together they bring the OLALAL OLED luminaire to the market. Also, many of our customers with designs based on the Lumiblade GL350 OLED are going to switch to the new OLED as well.

In September 2011 the EU launched a new €5 million project called IMOLA (Intelligent light management for OLED on foil applications) with an aim to realize large-area flexible OLED lighting modules with built-in intelligent light management. Philips just sent us this nice video which gives an introduction to OLED Lighting and to IMOLA's objectives here:

The basic idea behind IMOLA is that light intensity can be adjusted uniformly or locally according to the time of day or a person's position - and applications include wall, ceiling and in-vehicle (dome) lighting. Partners in this project include Philips, NXP Semiconductors, Henkel and Israel's Hanita Coatings.

Merck announced that the PrintOLED project successfully concluded. During the project, the partners investigate several technologies (such as gravure, inkjet printing, slot-die coating and others) and were able to demonstrated OLEDs with homogeneously coated active areas of 10 cm² and 27 cm² by classic gravure printing and slot die coating (at least two of the layers were processed from solution).

Merck says that printing two organic layers one on top of the other was a major challenge. The partners achieved significant improvements with specific material sequences. They say that they managed to print with speeds of up to 3 m/s semiconducting OLED layers with a homogeneity meeting the quality standards of industrial-scale OLED production. The knowledge was also applied to OPV and sDSC solar cells.

BMW hosted a workshop called "Light Days" which detailed the history, present and future of lighting in automobiles. BMW says that the future lighting technology will be OLED, and they expect to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years.

BMW says that the high homogeneity of OLEDs has several advantages (as you can see in the slide above) - mainly that it enables new styling options, it's efficient and long lasting and can offer high exclusivity. The company showed a prototype taillight design that uses Philips OLEDs. We also know that LG Chem are collaborating with BMW. This design seems pretty similar to Hella's own OLED prototype (which uses LG Chem's panels).

Yesterday Philips officially announced their latest OLED panel, the Lumiblade Brite FL300. Today German design studio design studio Emdedesign (owned by Thomas Emde) announced a new OLED brand called OMLED that use Philips' upcoming panels.

OMLED launched a wide range of OLED luminaries, all using Philips' new FL300 panels. OMLED launched dozens of lamps in four categories: Pendant lights, floor lamps, desk lamps and table lamps. The designs all look pretty similar. OMLED has an online shop and they detail the prices of this lamps which range from €750 (for a table lamp with a single OLED panel) to €2,850 (a chandelier with 5 OLED panels). The lamps will be available in September 2014.