Merck posts an interesting presentation detailing the company's OLED business. And it includes some interesting details. So first of all, Merck says that if OLEDs advances further, it could gain a meaningful share in the TV market. In fact, they forecast OLED panels to grab 10-15% of the total display market by 2019. By surface area, the market will grow to around 50 km², mostly from OLED TV applications.

Merck is still focused on OLED printing technologies over evaporation technologies as the technological advantages will enable cheaper large area panels. According to this presentation, in 2010 Merck started to collaborate with Epson on printable OLEDs (which is interesting as officially they announced this alliance in October 2012). Anyway Merck says that this alliance created a "significant momentum" in OLED printing technology. as you can see from the chart below which shows Merck's OLED development advances over time:

Samsung Display Corporation (SDC) established a new company to handle patent trading and development in the US. The new company is called Intellectual Keystone Technology (IKT) and it was established in Delaware in March 2013.

Reportedly Samsung invested $25 million in the new company. On April 30 IKT bought several patents from Seiko Epson. According to reports, these are LCD and OLED related patents.

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, working on high performance OLED materials. Back in April 2012 we posted our (third) interview with Merck's OLED unit VP, Dr. Udo Heider.

It seems that the soluble OLED materials market is heating up with recent announcements on printable OLED advances. So we asked Dr. Heider to give us a short updates on the happenings at Merck. As always, Merck are quite discreet...

Merck has signed a cooperation and licensing agreement with Seiko Epson. According to the agreement, Epson will supply Merck with ink technology that dissolves Merck's soluble OLED materials so that they can be used for the production of printable OLED displays. This brings Merck closer to providing production-ready OLED printing materials.

The two companies will also continue their close cooperation to create a strong ink-formulation roadmap in order for Merck to commercialize and address current and future requirements of the OLED TV industry, including the creation of industry-standard inks for manufacturing OLED TVs using inkjet technology.

Tokyo Electron (TEL) performed a re-organization, and as part of that they established a new OLED department (called the "organic EL division"), to be managed by Takeshi Okubo. This is good news and probably means that the company is putting a greater emphasis on OLED manufacturing equipment development.

TEL is developing OLED TV printing equipment together with Seiko Epson. In September 2011 it was reported that the two companies will launch an inkjet-printed OLED TV production plant in 2012 or 2013.

There are reports that Seiko Epson and Tokyo Electron are planning to launch an OLED TV production project, in a ¥2-3 billion ($20-40 million) investment. The companies are still considering several options for this plant, but apparently they want to begin installing equipment sometime in 2013, with "full scale mass production" in 2013. This seems a very small investment, so we're not sure if this is indeed mass production or just a pilot line.

The reports says that this will be a 6-Gen plant. Tokyo Electron and Seiko Epson announced their plans to co-develop OLED TV printing technology back in November 2010.

Tokyo Electron (TEL) and Seiko Epson will jointly-develop OLED display manufacturing technology. This project will integrate Epson's inkjet printing method and TEL's production equipment. The aim is to create next-generation OLED manufacturing technologies as a total-solution-package.

Back in 2009, we posted an interview with Satoru Miyashita, General Manager of Seiko Epson's Core Technology Development. Back then, Satoru estimated that by 2012 we'll see inkjet-printed OLED TVs.

Sony plans to sell an LCD plant that makes small-sized panels to Kyocera. Sony are moving away from LTPS (low-temperature polysilicon) and into a-Si (amorphous silicon) - they have just completed a deal to buy Seiko-Epson's small-size LCD operations that use the latter technology.

This is an interesting move by Sony, and might have implications on their OLED program, which shares some of the manufacturing process of LTPS LCDs.

Universal Display and Seiko Epson have been working on their inkjet printable, phosphorescent
OLED technology and materials for quite some time... They have now announced new advances in performace:

• A red P²OLED
  with CIE (0.67, 0.33), an efficiency of 10 candela per ampere (cd/A) and
  an operating lifetime of 20,000 hours, to 50% of initial luminance of
  1,000 nits


• A green P²OLED with CIE (0.33, 0.62), an
  efficiency of 34 cd/A and an operating lifetime of 25,000 hours.

Just a few days ago we talked to Seiko-Epson on their new inkjet OLED technology. They hope to have OLED TVs with this new tech in the market at around 2012.

Last month Seiko Epson has unveiled a new inkjet-printing technology for OLEDs, suitable for large sized panels. We have talked to Satoru Miyashita, General Manager of Seiko Epson's Core Technology Development Center about this new technology and their plans for OLED production.

Q: You have shown a new ink-jet based OLED technology. You say it will enable 37" or larger HD-OLED TVs. Do you have any plans to actually make such TVs? When do you think products can be made with this new tech?
Epson is currently considering a variety of options regarding the commercialization of this technology, but at this point no specific announcements have been made about plans. We see 2012 as being the year that 37"+ OLED TVs will be launched by various makers, and 2015 as the year that sales will really take off for this market.