Category Archives: OLEDs

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July 17, 2003 – The battle of the brands has begun.

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DuPont raised its flag first. In April, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. announced that its line of organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays would be known by the brand name Olight.

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Osram Opto Semiconductors Inc., a subsidiary of giant lamp maker Osram GmbH based in Munich, got into the game May 13 with the premiere of its Pictiva brand of OLED displays. The company plans to begin production by the end of 2003.
 
Kodak unveiled its OLED brand, NuVue, on May 20. The Rochester, N.Y., based company also announced that its EasyShare LS633 digital camera would be its first product with a color active-matrix OLED display.

Made of nanostructured polymer films, OLED screens emit their own light and are lighter, smaller and more energy efficient than conventional liquid crystal displays. To marketing and branding experts, the fact that three Fortune 500 heavyweights are vying to make OLED technology a consumer proposition suggests that the market for next generation nano-powered displays will be a real contest. According to research firm DisplaySearch, the market for OLED displays will grow from $112 million worldwide in 2002 to $3.1 billion by 2007.

Sony announced in early June that it will spend $76.6 million to ramp up production of OLED displays in a joint venture with Toyota Industries that already produces liquid crystal diode (LCD) displays. The company expects mass production of OLED panels to begin by the spring of 2004.
 
Of course, consumers may not care that they’re buying nanotechnology, but they may buy what OLEDs promise: brighter images with broader color spectra and wider viewing angles, as well as lower power consumption, than existing LCD technologies used in laptops and cell phones.

“We wanted to give consumers a name for this great experience, and have them associate that with Kodak,” said Joseph Runde, director of communications for Kodak Displays. Kodak has developed its “small molecule” OLED technology with Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd.,  and aims to bring its OLED screens not only to its own cameras, but also other devices such as PDAs, portable DVD players and other hand-held electronics.

It has already licensed passive matrix versions of its OLED screen technology to Pioneer Corp., TDK, eMagin Corp. and others. At a recent Society for Information Display conference, Runde reported that Audi displayed a prototype dashboard built around a Kodak OLED screen. Because “creating, building and sustaining a brand costs money,” Runde said, the company first did market research to determine whether distinguishing its screen technology from LCDs made financial sense. The company showed side-by-side comparisons of LCD screens and Kodak’s OLEDs, he said, and 70 percent were willing to pay as much as a 30 percent premium to have the brighter, more colorful screen.

Next came the task of developing a name and a logo that supported the messages of OLEDs’ virtues. NuVue won out over about 1,000 name candidates, said Runde, because it conveys the idea of a “new way of viewing.” The logo also suggests the wide viewing angle OLED tech offers.

And now the true brand building can begin. But it won’t be through a big advertising campaign. “The best place for consumers to see this is in a product, not an ad,” said Runde. “The Sony Trinitron didn’t start in a media campaign. It happened in electronics stores where people could see that the Trinitron looked better than other televisions.” Runde said that Kodak wants to make NuVue a feature consumers seek out. The brand could be revealed on the screen itself when it is turned on, as well as on the package and the device.

Through a spokesman, DuPont said that Olight is intended to serve as the brand for its full roadmap of OLED products, including passive and active matrix screens on glass substrates. The company’s ultimate aim is to develop full-color active matrix screens that can be applied to plastic substrates.

Aubrey Balkind, chief executive of Frankfurt Balkind, a 20-year-old agency specializing in the creation and building of brands such as Adobe Acrobat and About.com, sees the OLED land grab in two lights. DuPont has a strong record in developing brands such as Lycra and Teflon, while Kodak has had a long history of marketing directly to consumers (“Share Moments. Share Life.”) On the other hand, Balkind believes, multiple brands for a display technology embedded in other devices could create confusion for consumers. Balkind predicted that in the end, “one will probably triumph” and become synonymous with the new technology, much as TiVo has become the quasi-generic term for digital video recorders.

Balkind thinks the smart money is with DuPont’s Olight. “It’s got the biggest idea and a kind of timelessness to it,” he said. Kodak’s NuVue, Balkind observed, has the potential problem of sounding not so “Nu” in a few years. Pictiva sounded a bit generic to Balkind’s experienced ear.

In fact, while the branding guru liked Olight, he did have one critique. One of the principal technical virtues of OLED screens is that they emit their own light, whereas LCDs require backlighting. “Maybe DuPont should have called it GloLight,” he suggested.

April 15, 2003 – Intertech Corp. postponed its OLEDs Asia 2003 conference due to concerns related to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), according to a company news release.

 

The Portland, Maine-based conference producer, which specializes in imaging, displays and lighting, said the conference on organic light emitting diodes will be moved to March 2004 with an as-yet determined date and location. It had been scheduled for June 16-18 in Shanghai.

 

The company decided to delay the conference based on recommendations of international health officials, travel restrictions put in place by speakers and sponsors, and concerns among those who planned to attend, the release said.

March 5, 2003 — Eastman Kodak Co. is releasing what it calls the world’s first digital camera with an organic light emitting diode (OLED) display.

The EasyShare LS633, which will be commercially launched next month for about $400, features a 2.2-inch OLED display. Made of nanostructured polymer films, OLED screens emit their own light and are lighter, smaller and more energy efficient than conventional liquid crystal displays.

Kodak already is producing OLED color screens with Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. Commercial applications include car stereos and mobile phones.

Dec. 16, 2002 — DuPont Displays and Universal Display Corp. (UDC) said they plan to jointly develop a new generation of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) materials and technology.

The Wilmington, Del.-based unit of DuPont and Ewing, N.J.-based UDC have signed a cross-license agreement, in which DuPont Displays will make an initial payment to UDC and pay a running royalty for products sold using UDC’s technology. The firms expect to use a subcontractor to make the materials, according to a news release.

The companies said they believe that UDC’s phosphorescent OLED technology and DuPont Displays’ expertise in polymer science and optical components will offer higher performance and lower costs than current methods. The partnership also could enable OLEDs, which are made using thin, nanostructured polymer films, to capture an increased share of the $30 billion flat-panel display market, the release said.

Dec. 11, 2002 – Wilmington, DE, and Ewing, NJ – DuPont Displays, a business unit of DuPont and a developer and manufacturer of polymer OLED displays, together with Universal Display Corp. (UDC), an innovator of OLED technologies, have signed a joint development agreement to create a new generation of soluble OLED materials and technology.

UDC and DuPont have also executed a cross-license agreement, under which DuPont will make an initial payment to UDC and pay UDC a running royalty for products sold that utilize UDC’s background phosphorescent emitter, transparent cathode, and ink jet printing technologies.

The joint development agreement establishes an IP collaboration aimed at combining elements of both small molecule OLED and solution processible OLED research. DuPont intends to use the results of this strategic alliance to expand its OLED manufacturing capability. UDC, in turn, will have the exclusive right to license the results of the collaboration to third parties.

Oct. 2, 2002 — NanoVia LP of Londonderry, N.H., said it has developed an optical system design for making organic light-emitting diode display devices.

The VectorLinx platform is capable of patterning thin polymer and metal films on glass and silicon substrates to create display devices used in handheld personal digital assistants and mobile phones. NanoVia said it is pursuing partnership and joint venture deals in the United States and Asia, according to a news release.

NanoVia develops automated manufacturing equipment, optical systems and fabrication processing for microsystems and other markets.

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Sept. 20, 2002 — Philips, like GE, Intel, IBM and Samsung, is a large company that has adopted a small tech R&D program because it sees huge market potential. But Philips is mixing in a healthy dose of skepticism as it prepares small tech-enabled products for market.

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“We are not working on small tech because everybody else is,” explained Koen Joosse, a Philips spokesman. “We are carefully assessing the most promising technologies and only if they prove to be technically feasible, cost effective and give better performance, will we go ahead and use them.”

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Philips, one of Europe’s largest electronics companies with sales of $32 billion in 2001, is active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors and medical systems. Among its key products are color television sets, lights, electric shavers, medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems.

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Philips is mainly interested in high-volume markets, where fabrication costs are critical. So if a technology does not allow cost-effective mass production with sufficiently high yields, Philips cannot afford to use it.

An example of Philips’ successful use of small tech in commercial products is the company’s polymer organic light-emitting diode — or PolyLED — display. The company recently introduced the first monochrome PolyLED display in its latest men’s shaver. This is the first version of a range of future products that will incorporate the screens in computer notebooks, ultrathin TVs and ultimately even flexible displays.

The company is now preparing mass production of a full-color passive matrix display that will be launched at the end of next year. According to Martin Fleuster, development manager for PolyLED, these displays are targeted at small-screen devices such as mobile phones and MP3 players.

“I cannot give exact sales figures, but with our current pilot line for monochrome screens, we ship about 200,000 displays that sell for somewhere around $20 this year and expect to triple the volume next year. Since the market, which is 90 percent telecom, turns to full color screens fast, we intend to start up mass fabrication of our full-color display instead of the monochrome one,” Fleuster said.

“Philips worked closely together with CDT (Cambridge Display Technology) to develop the basic idea into a manufacturable technology suited for high-volume production, said Eliav Haskal, project leader of PolyLED research. “While CDT is mainly interested in selling intellectual property, we are focused on bringing this technology to market as soon as possible” using the company’s large facilities, extensive distribution network and financial resources needed to introduce any new technology.

“Our strategy is to work with companies that can help us achieve this goal, such as CDT and Litrex Corp., with whom we co-developed the required inkjet printing technology.”

Philips uses inkjet technology for definition of the color pixels. Each pixel is about 60 microns wide and the final polymer layer thickness is only 70 nanometers. To achieve these dimensions, a special piezoceramic-based inkjet head deposits liquid polymer droplets with a volume as low as 0.02 nanoliters with an inaccuracy of less than 5 percent.

“There are two basic technologies,” said Andrew Murray, senior analyst at iSuppli/Stanford Resources, a market and technology research firm that specializes in the electronic display industry. “Eastman Kodak invented an OLED that is based on vacuum deposition of small organic molecules. Approximately two years later CDT invented the polymer OLED. Companies like Pioneer, Samsung and Philips license the core patents from Kodak and CDT to develop marketable products.”

At the moment, it’s still too early to decide which technology will ultimately win. “The polymer OLED technology has the advantage of lower manufacturing costs due to a simpler process, but it still remains to be proven that it works in high-volume production,” Murray said.

Gerjan van de Walle, leader of the Integrated Device Technologies group at Philips Research, said the company is looking at other small tech applications, including radio frequency (RF) MEMS in next generation wireless applications.

“Integration could, theoretically, result in cheaper solutions,” van de Walle said. “We are currently evaluating the benefits of integrating RF components together with analog and digital electronics on one chip in practice and we still expect some obstacles ahead. Perhaps the technology proves to be more suitable for lower volume niche markets. Again, we’re not into MEMS just because it sounds good; there has to be a real benefit in using this technology.”

Another small technology Philips is investigating is use of carbon nanotubes for displays — also an area the company is approaching with skepticism.

“We have a research group that investigates this application,” van de Walle said. “It is just one of many competing flat display technologies. We are not entirely convinced that carbon nanotube displays will be the most successful, even though some companies are already anticipating its breakthrough on the market.”

Murray agrees: “Research is still in its very early days. There are not a lot of display companies that seriously look into this application of carbon nanotubes,” he said.

“Sometimes, press releases on possible market introduction should be regarded more as PR or fund-raising activity than anything else.”

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Aug. 29, 2002 — Small tech is heading to the small screen.

Displays made of glowing plastic molecules called OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) promise brighter and cheaper alternatives to liquid crystal displays (LCDs).

Made of thin, nanostructured polymer films, OLED screens based on technologies developed by companies such as Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) in England and Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y., are beginning to hit the market.

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OLEDs could enable thinner, lower-powered and more flexible screens for uses in products such as cameras, PDAs, cell phones, laptops, computer monitors and even televisions.

Because they emit their own light, while LCDs require a light source, OLEDs would use less power, take up less space and be lighter — all cost effective advantages over LCDs.

OLED expert Barry Young, vice president of DisplaySearch, an Austin, Texas, market research company, forecasts that OLED screen sales will reach $2.5 billion by 2006.

Kodak is already producing OLED color screens based on its “small molecule” technology in partnership with Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. Commercial applications include Pioneer car stereos and Motorola Inc. cell phones.

Universal Display Corp. of Ewing, N.J., announced Aug. 12 that the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded it two $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts to develop its OLED technologies for general lighting applications.

On Aug. 16, DuPont Displays and RiTdisplays of Taiwan launched high-volume production of OLED display modules at a fabrication facility in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

CDT’s polymer screens, produced with inkjet-printing equipment from the company’s Litrex Corp. subsidiary, have already debuted in monochrome versions for a Philips electric shaver, said Stewart Hough, CDT vice president of business development. He also said the company expects full-color products to reach the market by the third quarter next year, with full-color active matrix displays suitable for PDAs and laptop screens ready by 2004.

Last week, CDT announced a partnership to integrate MediaWorks Technology Corp. Inc.’s System-on-Chip” (SoC) display controllers with its polymer displays. One goal is to use MediaWorks’ intelligent electronics to reduce power consumption in portable devices. Another is to extend the life span of the plastic display’s pixels by sending signals only when needed.

Young said that OLED screen life has greatly improved from about 2,000 hours a few years ago to 10,000 hours today, and he expects life spans to double to 20,000 hours in the next year or two.

Young anticipates that the plastic screens will initially cost more than LCDs and find applications in small displays like camera viewfinders and mobile phones. But within three to four years, he believes, they will cost 10 to 20 percent less and boast higher performance than LCDs.

Compared with LCDs, Young noted, OLEDs offer higher contrast, faster response time and wider viewing angles while using less power. Frost & Sullivan consultant Mamta Kailkhura wrote in an April report that “the superior display properties of OLEDs pose a direct challenge to the prevailing dominance of LCDs in the flat panel displays market.”

Young expects to see OLEDs move up into notebook computers and eventually into television sets. Young said that next year Sony will market a 13-inch OLED television based on Kodak and Sanyo’s small molecule display.

Young said that Kodak has the early commercial lead and an advantage in color and lifetime over CDT’s technique. He noted, however, Kodak’s approach requires materials to be evaporated through a mask, while CDT polymers can be put into a solution and applied to a surface much more efficiently and economically with inkjet equipment.

“With CDT’s technology, you can pattern pixels more densely” for high resolution displays, he explained. Young also noted that CDT’s process was 5 to 10 percent faster than Kodak’s.

CDT’s Hough said that small technology has been essential in commercializing OLEDs. Small tech comes into play in everything from equipment used to measure and analyze the light-emitting polymer films, Hough said, to refining the complex organic chemistry necessary to improve the optical performance of polymer displays.

By Kyle James
Small Times Correspondent

HANNOVER, Germany, April 25, 2002 — Germany has long considered itself a loser in the flat panel display industry. And for good reason, since about 97 percent of all flat panel displays are produced in Asia.

Now the country is ready to steal some of that business away from the Far East and it sees the current development of new flat screen technology as the ideal time to strike.

To get ready for battle, 13 companies that are part of the German Flat Panel Display Forum

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This image from Siemens shows one
possible use for flat panel displays: A
cell phone with a roll-up display that
allows full Internet access.
(DFF), an industry consortium, formed a new company this month called the German OLED Reference Line, or DORA for short. DORA’s goal is simple: Elaborate a strategy and a product to bring the production of competitive flat panel displays to Germany. It hopes to do this by jumping in while the technology for flat displays is changing.

OLED is the magic acronym, standing for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. It is a technology based on light-emitting plastics that proponents say is head and shoulders above LCD display technology, which is used in about 90 percent of today’s flat panel displays.

“Imagine having a 13-inch TV screen — one that is as thick as a credit card,” said Eric Maiser, one of the directors of the display panel consortium that formed DORA, “or the day when you can just inkjet print your display.” OLED displays are superior to LCD displays in that they use less energy, are brighter, and can be viewed from any angle.

To create an OLED display, a plastic substrate is covered with up to four layers of light-emitting plastics. Four layers might sound like a lot, but together they are only approximately 150 nanometers thick.

“It needs of bit more development, but production can be dirt cheap,” Maiser said.

Part of DORA’s mission is to kick-start that last step of development — for example, finding a way to encapsulate the OLEDs, which are very sensitive to water vapor and oxygen.

DORA has come together now because research by the German Flat Panel Display Forum showed that if the country wanted to be at the forefront of the new display technology, it had to act now. It missed out on the current market when Japan beat the world in discovering the success potential of display technology in the 1980s and invested early to expand production capacity. The Japanese have already launched flat panel displays that uses a hybrid OLED technology, but not one with all the benefits and long life of the proposed German version, according to Maiser.

DORA plans to spend the next year figuring out the last technical obstacles and hopes to launch its pilot line in mid 2003, with mass production by 2005. “We want to introduce this new production technology to really be able to make money out of this,” he said.

But before they make any money, they are going to have to find quite a bit of it. DORA itself has been financed to the tune of approximately $800,000 by the 13 companies taking part, along with help from the Federal State of Saxony and the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. But it is estimated the company will need an investment of $50 million in the first year to come up with the pilot line, and $500 million to eventually build an OLED volume manufacturing plant. A good part of this first year will be spent looking for those investors.

Consortia like the German Flat Panel Display Forum are not unusual in Germany, where companies often come together in loose associations to share information and pursue research, up to a point. When they feel their proprietary information might be at risk, they usually break away. The German display panel consortium is made up of 70 members, including Siemens, BMW, Samsung, IBM and several Fraunhofer Institutes.

These kinds of consortia have distinct advantages, according to Silke Erlemann of Covion Organic Semiconductors, which is one of the DORA’s founding companies. “When new technology is at an early stage, it helps to have partners,” she said. “It lowers your investment and it lowers your risk.”

OLED displays gain on LCDs


October 16, 2001

By:

Ruth DeJule

Technical editor, WaferNews

An organic light emitting diode (OLED) display technology has been developed that exhibits up to 16 million colors. Based on Kodak patents, the full-color active matrix OLED developed by eMagin Corp., Hopewell Junction, NY, contains more than 1.5 million individually addressable picture elements.

For objects to look “real,” a display must be able to render a wide range of colors and shades. With a limited color gamut, for example, images may look slightly washed out, appearing more pastel than vibrant. EMagin displays have a balanced full-color spectrum which adjusts the red, green, and blue relative intensities to create an acceptable looking white, stated Webster Howard, eMagin’s VP of technology. Optimal white balance may vary with individual preference but the overall effect is fuller, deeper colors, exceeding that of current notebook-type LCDs.

While LCDs dominate the flat panel display (FPD) market, there is room for improvement, such as better color range and dynamic response for fast-action videos like sports broadcasts. For TV applications, improvement in viewing angle is needed but often conflicts with the response time. And from a cost perspective, they are 2 to 3 times more expensive than cathode ray tubes (CRT). Most R&D laboratories still use CRT displays and miniature CRTs are frequently used in camcorders and other viewfinder applications. CRTs have better temperature and pressure ranges than LCDs; however, size, weight, high-voltage requirements, color resolution limitations, and cost make them a less attractive microdisplay solution, unless extreme operating conditions are required, such as being in the outdoors in the wintertime.

With the advent of laptops, FPDs have offered low power, high luminance, lighter weight, and easy integration with optics. Recently, they have benefited from the capability for integration on silicon ICs to provide system-on-a-chip. High resolution images make them suitable for mobile information products such as portable computers, wireless Internet viewers, portable DVD players, gaming platforms, and wearable computers. Most direct-view color OLEDs use three independent emitting materials to obtain red, green, and blue primaries. In microdisplays, the color subpixels are only a few micrometers wide. Filters are patterned at these dimensions and OLED pixels are made correspondingly small. To enhance color quality, eMagin modifies the color filter structures using a propriety process, said Howard.

eMagin’s 0.62-inch (diagonal) active screen has over 1.5 million potential color subpixel elements (600 X 3 X 852 pixels) and 52 more imaging columns than standard SVGA displays, making it possible for the display to run either 600 X 800 pixels in order to interface to the analog output of portable computers or 852 X 480 pixels in a 16:9 wide screen entertainment format. All the color and luminance value information at each of the pixel elements are stored in the display array to decrease flicker or color breakup.

In the next few years, the industry can expect improvements in life, efficiency, and cost, allowing penetration of OLEDs into market segments currently dominated by LCDs, noted Howard. Large screen OLEDs will take more than a few years.