*** OLED 2003
By John Latta
November 20-22
San Diego, California
Over 250 industry executives attended this international
conference designed to address business issues facing the
industry, including market size and growth, technical advances and
hurdles, application trends, and production economics for organic
light emissive displays (OLEDs). This is put on by Intertech
Conferences and is an outstanding OLED gathering.
www.intertechusa.com
Highlight include.
DisplaySeach
Barry Young of DisplaySearch presented some simple test results.
The OLED on the back of the Kodak Easyshare LS633 camera, which
was announced in February 2003, is the only full color OLED on
the market. DisplaySearch tested it for lifetime over 1000 hours
and found:
White color loss was 50%
Blue dropped 70%
Red dropped 30%
Green dropped <30%
Differential aging was quite severe.
However, when video was run through the panel the lifetimes
went up 10X.
Barry drew the conclusion, given today’s materials and the
dominance of white on PC screens, the role of OLEDs on PCs and
notebooks is in doubt. He showed a screen using Word to reinforce
the observation that PCs rely on white screens to display much of
the information.
The prospects for television are much brighter than many had
expected due to the significant increase in lifetime when used
for moving displays. It was interesting that many of the later
talks focused on the applications of OLEDs in television. An
emphasis we had not seen before.
Barry Young estimated the OLED market at $259m in 2003, mostly
due to sub displays for cell phones. A major challenge continues
to lie with the material lifetime.
For the first time DisplaySearch showed recently completed
analysis of the TFT LCD profitability. In Q2 and Q3 Barry claims
that the top 5 suppliers in the TFT LCD industry are making
profits. This is in spite of the drop in ASP for a 15” panel from
$625 in 3Q99 to $187 in 2Q03. A substantial reason for this is
the migration to later generation fabs which make for more
efficient production due to the much larger substrate sizes.
SK Display Corp – Sanyo and Eastman Kodak
G. Rajeswaran, SK Display Corp., the joint venture between Sanyo
and Eastman Kodak, provided an overview of the status of their
efforts. The highlight was Kodak’s progress is their claim of 1
year’s experience in mass production of a full color AMOLED. The
lessons learned from this cited the statement “Full color OLED
manufacturing is hard work.” This is, of course small molecule
materials, which Kodak is the inventor and holder of the rights
to.
SK Display cited that there is no need for a solid white display,
based on Kodak’s experience with a display on a digital camera. A
typical photograph uses on 20% to 25% of full white. This led to
the statement that
“OLED Display Lifetime = Function of the display image
content over time under given conditions of peak luminance
and display surface temperature/”
SK Display showed two vectors for the roadmap.
High Resolution Displays but small form factor suitable for
cell phones
Large size displays for TV and HDTV.
RiTdisplay
RiTdisplay is in Taiwan and claims to be the largest volume
producer of OLEDs. They claimed a market share of 36.7% against
Pioneer with 33.9% in 2003. RiTdisplay sees the Mobil phone
market, and especially in Korea, as being the key. The reason
being, that Korea has adopted the sub-display as an important
part of the phone and RiTdisplay is the supplier of the OLED
based sub-display. In 2003 RiTdisplay will ship more that 4m sub-
displays. These are passive matrix displays and in Q3 or Q4
RiTdisplay will launch AMOLED.
Samsung
The Samsung talk was entitled “Challenges of Large Size OLED” and
the target market was clear – large size, up to 50”, televisions
based on OLED. They brought with them, for the demo area, a 15.5”
AMOLED based on LTPS technology. It is claimed to be the largest
of its type. The colors were just stunning.
In order to lay down the materials Samsung is advocating a
technique they call LITI (Laser Induced Thermal Imaging). This
will work with Polymer (PLED) or LEP/SM Hybrid OLED or SM OLED.
According to these claims, Samsung has a fab technology which is
OLED material independent. Yet, others on the floor stated this
may not be the case and, thus, the ability of this technology to
support mass production is questionable.
OSRAM
OSRAM announced its entry onto the OLED market. It has a fab in
Penang, Malaysia. The technology is based on polymers. It claims
to start production in 2003. It is using the brand name Pictiva.
Cambridge Displays Technology
Dr, David Fyfe gave a talk entitled LEP OLED – Key Success
Factors. David claimed that if OLEDs were to be a success it
would be accomplished with Polymers because of the superior cost
model for fabrication. That is, ink jet mass production methods
would have the dominant fabrication economics.
Universal Display Corp
UDC claims to have the high efficiency phosphorescent small
molecule materials. It seems as if we have heard this same talk
many times. The problem is the blue material and this talk was
notable in its omission of any lifetime estimates of blue. It
appears that no company is prepared to construct a full color
display with materials from different vendors and thus until UDC
can solve the blue problem they face a difficult and skeptical
market.
Covion
Covion is the only company which is technology agonistic. It has
efforts in:
Fluorescent Small Molecules
Fluorescent Polymer
Phosphorescent Small Molecules
Phosphorescent Polymers
Their presentation at OLED 2003 was focused on phosphorescent
materials and the blue challenge.
The size of the materials production, given the small amount of
materials used in each panel, is 10Kgs per manufacturing line.
Covion stated that this is a small volume even by specialty
chemical standards. They made an observation that there are 30
vendors chasing a modest opportunity market of $200m to $300m and
we should expect consolidation.
Dow
Dow focused on polymers. Interesting results were presented on
their efforts in blue polymer development. Examples of 4 new
polymers were shown. A new material has recently emerged and that
is white polymer and Dow announced a new material.
Recently Dow completed the construction of its polymer
manufacturing facility.
Wave Comments
An important transition has taken place in OLED. Large scale
manufacturing has begun. RiTdisplay is producing 4m displays a
year. Kodak is in volume production with its partner Sanyo with
the only full color panels based on their small molecule
technology. Philips is also in production and reports yields at
80%. What is significant is that this marks the shift from
concept to volume. Everyone characterized this as painful.
It was most refreshing to see world class chemical companies like
Covion and Dow seriously addressing the OLED materials issues.
This has only begun and it may be years before significant
progress is made. However, having major suppliers of these
materials is very important to the industry both from a research
and production standpoint.
The claims of lifetime by every company are near worthless. There
are no uniform measurement standards, and it appears that no one
wants them. The gap between lab measurements under controlled
conditions and practical tests on mass produced displays are two
totally different aspects of the same issue. What is different at
this conference is that the application plays a significant role
in determining the lifetime and the industry has yet to sort this
out.
Wave Issue 0346 01/16/04 Article 2-01