P-OLEDs and Plextronics; Progress?

The announcement today by Plextronics of improved P-OLED operating voltages and voltage stability is important stuff. It moves the cause of printed OLEDs a little bit further towards true productization. It is just as Plextronics and CDT say; low voltage HILs mean lower power usage and this is critical in the mobile display business.

Mobile is an important addressable market for P-OLEDs. This is because, mobile displays have already seen some penetration by OLEDs and - compared with OLED TVs anyway - performance requirements in the mobile space are fairly relaxed.

But the announcement also needs to be seen in historical context.

Printed OLEDs have a long way to go before they can claim a real victory. CDT, the source of so much of the thinking about printed/polymer OLEDs, cannot really point to a marketplace success as yet. It has been talking about how great P-OLEDs are for several years, but the OLED market is stubbornly still 98 percent small-molecule vapor-deposited devices. Meanwhile, CDT itself has gone through several ownership changes and apparently also changes in where it believes P-OLED applications will really take off.

Such changes are hardly signs of strength for CDT or P-OLEDs.

Today, I talked with someone who had a strong commitment to "old way" of doing OLEDs and he thought that printed polymer OLEDs without a future. This seems a little extreme. At NanoMarkets we think that printed OLEDs actually do have a future.

All the fuss about OLED lighting only really makes sense if an OLED replacement for common light bulb isn't orders of magnitude more expensive than the lighting it replaces. Printing seems like a believable way to get the cost of OLED lighting down. (Stories about ultra-long lifetimes, only get you so far in your marketing pitch.) And as far as I can tell, large flexible OLED displays for TV and signage applications could better be manufactured using a low temperature process.

But the current financial climate injects a new sense of urgency into the equation.

In a better financial climate, new technologies can take a decade or more to evolve at the start-ups formed to support them, but in tighter economic climates, time and funding gets shorter. As an industry analyst in the telecom space earlier in my career I saw first hand what a boom and bust can do to interesting new technologies. It's not pretty!