|
Polymer OLED market shakes up, while well-encapsulated microdisplays shake out into market |
|
|
|
Aug 24, 2007 at 11:38 AM |
Polymer-based organic light-emitting devices, or P-OLEDs, have caught the fancy of many, but their producers have made very little money from them.
Up to this point, the curious little LEDs have been seen as a great concept, an intriguing technology with gigapixels of potential, but they've resulted in few commercially viable products. But there's room for optimism: One of P-OLED's originators, Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and its up-and-down fortunes, was bought recently for just south of $300 million by Sumitomo Chemical. Suddenly, one set of P-OLED's pockets have become a lot deeper.
One of the other P-OLED proponents, MicroEmissive Displays (MED), which has an exclusive license from CDT, just ramped its modest production fab in Dresden and has been shipping its eyescreen microdisplay products since July. The Barix thin-film encapsulation technology and tooling provided by Vitex Systems and its equipment partner, ANS Korea, played a significant role in allowing MED to ramp their manufacturing line and stay on schedule. For more info, check my news story about MED, Vitex and P-OLED on smalltimes.com, which was published earlier today.
Earlier this month in another part of the blogosphere, Barry Young of Display Search wrote one of the best analyses of the P-OLED market and technology space that I've seen, titled "Sumitomo Doubles Down and Purchases CDT While Osram Folds." His piece can be found here or accessed via the link to the Display Search beta blog in the Chip Shots blogroll.
Among his mainly salient points, Barry says that roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing, using solution-based, ink-jet print processing, ultimately may be the best approach for the kind of low-cost, high-volume production capabilities that will allow P-OLEDs to become a multibillion-dollar market one day. (btw, when I asked MED about whether they had any plans for going from their current wafer-based process to R2R, they answered with a terse "not applicable.")
Although I didn't have enough space to include anything about the state of R2R P-OLED processing in my news story, Vitex's Chyi-Shan Suen updated me on how the company's own R2R activities were coming along. "Our Flexible Glass substrate has proven to be mass-producible in a roll-to-roll process. Our Flexible Glass licensee has been working hard and has made tremendous progress. We have received many requests from various customers, not only from the OLED industry but also other application fields, for Flexible Glass samples in a roll format. We believe that our licensee will fulfill these requests very soon."
Chyi-Shan also shared some results from Vitex's tensile-bending tests on its Flexible Glass, noting that the substrate "can pass 1000 cycles with a bending diameter of 25 mm and over 100 cycles with 12-mm diameter."
Back to Barry's blog. He mentioned MED in passing, so I posted some comments in response to his musings, asking for his take on the Scottish P-OLED player. Here are my comments/questions and his replies:
TC/Chip Shots: "You barely mention MicroEmissive Displays in your analysis. What do you think of MED’s recent moves into 'volume' production—they say they’ve started shipping product in July—using the CDT licensed technology? Although they admittedly make small form-factor P-OLED displays, how do you like their chances? What impact might the Sumitomo-CDT deal have on them?"
BY/Display Search: "MED is producing OLED microdisplays at ~0.7-inch in diagonal. The amount of P-OLED material used, even for 10M displays (announced capacity) per year is miniscule and would not be a sustainable licensing revenue for CDT or material revenue for Sumation, without several major display makers. MED products will be used for near-eye applications and should have an advantage over LCD-based microdisplays, because they do not need an external light source or light modulation components. The MED microdisplays should be thinner (especially by using thin-film encapsulation), lower cost and use less power. However, the market is currently limited and highly competitive."
|
Blogs 
