OLED 2003
By John.N.Latta
Wave Issue 0346 01/16/04
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
November 20-22 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. Highlights 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% 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: 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||
| Comments? |
||||||||||||||||||
