OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 17

The Korea Times posted an interesting interview with Merck's OLED unit VP, Dr. Udo Heider. Udo is 'pretty confident' that Samsung will soon start producing OLED TVs again.

In the past few weeks we heard several conflicting reports on Samsung's OLED TV program. Some say they will abandon OLEDs completely (and go for QLED TVs instead), while other reports say that Samsung will soon re-enter the OLED TV market. Last year Merck stated that Quantum Dot based TVs, unlike OLEDs, are no game changer.

Yesterday Merck inaugurated a new OLED Application Center (OAC) in Pyeongtaek, Korea. Merck invested over €7 million in the new center, and it hopes it will enable them to increase customer satisfaction and capture a larger share of the market - by shortening their time to market.

The OAC has a range of equipment for OLED evaporation testing and reliability analysis. In the future, it will introduce advanced processes such as inkjet printing. The OAC resides in the same site as Merck's Chemical Application Centre established in 2011. Merck also operates a technology development center in Taiwan - which also focuses on OLEDs.

According to IHS, the OLED TV market will see slow growth unless producers manage to apply new technologies - mainly printing processes based on soluble materials and flexible substrates. If both technologies are to be adopted, IHS sees OLED TV shipments reaching almost 40 million units in 2023.

In the chart above, IHS Uses three cases. In Case 1, OLED TV makers use glass substrate and an evaporation process. In case 2 they adopt a printing process and soluble materials, and Case 3 assumes a flexible substrate is used as well.

DuPont has been working on OLED materials and processes for a long time, but it's been a while since we heard any update. David Flattery, DuPont's OLED unit Director of Operations was kind enough to update us on the company's materials and OLED technologies.

Q: Dave - thanks for this interview. We know that DuPont is focusing on soluble OLED materials and processes. When do you see the OLED display industry starting to adopt such materials?

DuPont is focused on developing OLED materials for evaporation and soluble technologies, as well as working with our partners on our proprietary printing process.

Many in the industry believe that 2017 will be the year of mass production for printed OLED televisions, and while we cannot disclose the manufacturing plans for our partners, we have already seen one large manufacturer announce that they will pilot solution- processed OLED displays up to gen-8 in 2015.

Kateeva and Sumiomo Chemical announced a non-exclusive key partnership to pair Sumitomo's PLED materials to Kateeva's YieldJet OLED ink-jet printing platform. The two companies hope this collaboration will lead to adoption of P-OLED inkjet printing by OLED TV makers.

Kateeva and Sumitomo will cooperate to co-develop high-quality reference data for customers, which will be optmized to Kateeva's platform and Sumitomo's inks.

JOLED (Japan OLED) was launched in August 2014 by Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic with an aim to become an OLED medium display producer (focusing at first on OLEDs for tables, laptops and signage). Today the company was finally officially established and began operating.

According to reports from Japan, JOLED is headed by Orbotech Japan former president, and employs around 260 people. JOLED is owned by INCJ (75%), Japan Display (15%), Sony (5%) and Panasonic (5%). The company's current plan is to focus on 10-20 inch OLEDs and to begin pilot production in H2 2016 and mass production in 2H 2017. JOLED will mainly target laptops and tablets. It will great to finally get an OLED laptop, but hopefully we won't have to wait till 2017...

Ink-jet printing is one of the great promises of OLED technology. Everybody hopes that using soluble OLEDs and a printing process could cut OLED production costs, and result in cheaper displays. In fact ink-jet printing may bring us high-quality OLED TVs that cost less than LCDs. Don't miss our new article that gives an introduction to OLED ink-jet printing.

According to OLEDNet, Seiko Epson developed a new OLED ink-jet printer head that can achieve a resolution of 360 PPI. This high-density print head uses two 180 PPI nozzles in 2 offset rows. The company managed to print prototype bottom-emitting and top-emitting OLED devices using this print head.

OLEDNet says that Seiko Epson is now aiming to develop a 600 PPI ink-jet printer head, by using two rows of 400 PPI nozzles.

Kateeva unveiled a new mass production flexible OLED thin film encapsulation (TFE) system based on their ink-jet technology. The YIELDjet FLEX can enable cost-effective encapsulation deposition, and Kateeva says that the first mass-production system will ship to a customer in Asia later this month. This customer is probably Samsung Display (which recently invested in Kateeva), but this is not confirmed.

Kateeva says that inkjet printing enables superb particle performance, high efficiency and excellent scalability. The YIELDjet system is enclosed in a pure-nitrogen chamber, which is the best OLED processing environment, shielding the OLED materials from moisture and air. The ink-jet system provides exceptional planarization of substrate surface structures and particles and results in unprecedented film uniformity.

Several OLED markets are heating up - OLED TVs, Flexible OLEDs, wearables, OLED lighting, the automotive market... Barry Young from the OLED Association, one of the world's top OLED experts, was kind enough to offer his views and opinion on the OLED market.

Q: What is your expectation from the OLED TV market in the next 1-3 years? Will LG be the only player (and if so what will be their capacity) or will Samsung and perhaps other enters the market too?

LG chose to implement the metal oxide/White OLED approach and has succeeded, where Samsung’s choice of LTPS/Small Mask Scanning (SMS) has proven too expensive to pursue even with ~80% yields.