A Future for Printed OLEDs

On the face of it, OLEDs appear to have a lot of market potential.  Their vibrant colors and thin format promise a new generation of televisions and mobile displays much superior in visual quality than LCD displays.  And OLED lighting may a new technology that fills the gap when incandescent lights begin to disappear from the market in the 2012/2013 timeframe. 

In both cases, price points are going to be crucial to the success of OLEDs and one way to achieve better prices is with printing.  As we emphasize in this article, this is largely a matter of finding the right materials.  Although printed OLEDs have never quite achieved the success that some have projected for them, as this article shows, a surprisingly large number of the world’s biggest materials and chemical firms are betting on them.  The information for this article is drawn from NanoMarkets’ latest research report on OLED materials in which we forecast that sales of polymer OLED materials – the kind of OLED materials used in printed OLEDs – will reach $475 million in sales by 2017.

The OLED business has had many ups and downs.  Once predicted to be “what’s next” after LCD, OLED displays have lingered at the fringes of the display industry for quite a few years, and have only just begun to move beyond the physically small and unprofitable MP3 and cell phone sub-display sectors.  The hope for ultra-cool – and ultra-thin – OLED TVs took a hit last year when it became apparent that in the middle of the world’s worst recession for many years, consumers would be unwilling to pay thousands of dollars for a medium-sized OLED TV set. 

Perhaps the final indignity for OLEDs came when, at the end of 2009, Kodak, who more or less invented OLEDs, announced that it would sell its OLED business to a group of LG companies.

Nonetheless, OLEDs are alive and well.  A new generation of OLED televisions is expected to reach the market soon.  And perhaps more importantly, OLED lighting now seems to be a major opportunity to provide the efficient lighting that the market will demand when incandescent lights start to be phased out in the 2012/2013 timeframe in many nations across the globe.

With all this in mind, NanoMarkets believes that it is important to remember that the opportunities available in both the OLED display and lighting space are first and foremost materials-enabled opportunities; they are all about designing materials that have better and better lifetimes, brightness, efficiencies, frequency stability and manufacturability.

No wonder then that some of the world’s great materials firms – DuPont, 3M, Bayer, Sumitomo, among them – have staked their claim in the OLED space.  It is also a vote of confidence in OLED technology which, as we have just seen, could use such a vote.  But we must also ask ourselves what exactly is this vote for.  What has become the standard version of OLEDs uses small molecule materials and what amounts to deposition technologies that have been borrowed from the standard armory of manufacturing tools. 

But there is another way to make OLEDs and that is to print them. 

DuPont and the Participation of Large Firms in the Printed OLED Business

To date, however, printed OLEDs have been a niche business.  However, we believe that the recent announcement by DuPont that it has come up with a way to effectively print large OLED devices is a reminder that printed OLEDs could still emerge as an important approach to OLED manufacturing.  It is also a reminder that it is not only start-ups and small firms that are looking at the printed OLED opportunity, but some of the giants of the chemical and materials industries as well. 

Indeed, some of the large materials firms that are hope to make money from OLEDs down the road have looked to the smaller pioneers in this field for a technological assist.  Thus, Sumitomo acquired CDT some time back and in June 2009, Add-Vision signed a technology and patent license agreement with Bayer MaterialScience, granting Bayer the right to manufacture and sell OLED devices based on Add-Visions printable OLED IP.

And the printed OLED announcement mentioned above is certainly not DuPont’s first foray into the printed OLED space.  In fact, the company has taken a strong interest in OLEDs, with research and development in the area for the past 17 years.  In the printed area, some time back, it announced a way to solution process small molecules, an attractive approach because printed OLEDs usually mean printed polymer OLEDs, which implies that display and lighting makers to who take the printed path have to opt for two technology leaps of faith; a new manufacturing approach (printing) and a new materials choice (polymers).  With printed small moleculeOLEDs, only one big leap is required. 

Also, DuPont, it seems, has an interest in printing not only OLED displays, but OLED lighting too.  Thus, in November 2009, DuPont was awarded a $2.25-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to fund a two-year project to create a solution-processed OLED for lighting applications. 

Other Firms, Other OLED Materials, Agfa and Merck

Agfa:  For OLED applications, Agfa Materials products of greatest interest are its Orgacon line of products. These are based on Agfa’s version of the organic polymer transparent conductor PEDOT: PSS, and are available as inks, coating solutions, and precoated PET films in 175-, 125-, or 63-μm thicknesses.  In April 2009, Agfa, working with some other companies demonstrated a 12 by 12 cm white OLED tile using Orgacon PEDOT: PSS in conjunction with printed metallic shunting lines, without the need for an ITO layer.

Merck:  Merck is another major materials firm with collaborative involvements in printed OLEDs.  In November 2009, Merck announced the launch of a new project: New Materials for OLEDs from Solutions (NEMO). The project is co-funded by the German government, with a total budget of about €32 million, and runs through July 2012. The other commercial partners are H.C. Starck, Ormecon, and DELO Industrie Klebstoffe. The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research is participating as an independent research firm, and the academic partners include the University of Tuebingen, the University of Regensburg, Humboldt University of Berlin, and University of Potsdam.

Merck is also involved in Light InLine (LILi), which is an OLED lighting research program announced in November 2009. Nearly half of the three-year €7.5-million project is funded by the German government, and the other participants are Applied Materials and the Braunschweig University of Technology. The program is aimed at developing low-cost manufacturing processes for OLED lighting devices.

Encapsulation:  3M, GE and DuPont Teijin Another large materials company – 3M – has development work going on that is highly relevant to printed OLEDs.  More specifically, 3M has focused on encapsulation for roll-to-roll (R2R) production of printed OLEDs on a plastic substrate.  Encapsulation is an especially tricky problem for R2R manufacturing of OLEDs because, the materials – especially the cathode materials – are extremely vulnerable to oxygen and water vapor and because effective encapsulation on flexible plastic substrates is very hard to achieve when compared with glass.  3M’s roadmap in this regard calls for development on 310-mm wide substrates through 2011, with the goal of commercial production on substrates with a width of a meter or more by 2012. Some of the issues that need improvement, and which 3M is working on, are quality control, edge sealing, and manufacturing efficiency.

3M is not the only major materials firm to take an interest in substrate and encapsulation issues with regard to printed/R2R OLEDs.   GE has developed a multilayer thin-film barrier coating technology for encapsulation. In 2007, it licensed its patented PECVD film encapsulation process to TOKKI for use in the company’s OLED manufacturing equipment.

Meanwhile, the joint venture, DuPont Teijin offers PET under the brand name Melinex, and PEN under the brand Teonex for this and similar applications.  How far this technology can be taken – at least in the lab – is indicative of the importance of this area of OLED materials development.  Thus, in June 2009, the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University and UDC announced that they had created a flexible OLED display, manufactured directly on a Teonex substrate.

Some Conclusions