NanoMarkets TOP Blog - David Lieberman's Blogs

OLED Lighting Markets

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:38:00 -0700

The following article was drawn from NanoMarkets' upcoming report on OLED Lighting Markets

Several trends are converging to make SSL (solid-state lighting) of all kinds an attractive opportunity. There is worldwide interest in finding new SSL technologies that are more energy efficient, for example. This has already led to the creation of a healthy market for ILEDs (inorganic light-emitting diodes), especially high-brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs) for signals, signs, and automotive lighting. And there is a fair amount of ongoing investment from private corporations in ILEDs with the hope that they will expand their market further into general illumination markets. There is also considerable willingness by governments all over the world to spend taxpayers' money on LED lighting in the belief that they are energy saving and environmentally friendly.

This interest in ILEDs coupled with the success of ILEDs in the marketplace have encouraged both technology developers and materials firms to look at other SSL solutions that might either be complementary to ILEDs or an improvement on them. Organic LED (OLED) lighting is on the verge of providing an excellent complementary technology today, with the promise of improving on ILEDs in the future in particular applications suited to the OLED's particular talents. (It also provides an interesting diversification for OLED display firms that have been frustrated by the twists and turns of the OLED display market.)

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Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:50:00 -0700

NanoMarkets will be releasing a report on organic electronics materials markets in December. The following is a brief excerpt

Research into the electrical properties of organic materials dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, but it is only in the last five years or so that stable organic electronics materials with well-defined properties have appeared at a commercial level. Since then organic electronics has made huge strides. It is no longer regarded as little more than scientific curiosities. Today, we already have one sizeable industry - the OLED display industry - built around such materials. Other industry sectors now seem ready to buy into organic electronics to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. These sectors include displays - both frontplanes and backplanes - RFID, photovoltaic panels, sensors and lighting, to name a few.

During 2007, the use of OLEDs in cell phone main displays has accelerated and the first OLED televisions have appeared. This year has also seen the first full-scale production of organic transistor-based display backplanes, an alliance of powerful firms committed to commercializing organic memory, and some early volume shipments of organic RFID tags.

The Worm in the Bud

All of this is very good news for the pioneers of organic electronics, who have been pushing its virtues for years. Unfortunately there is a worm in the organic electronics bud. This "worm" is the simple fact that the materials that are currently used to create organic materials have significant limitations in at least three areas. . [More]

Psyching out the Market for Solid-State Lighting

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:12:00 -0700

This past month, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report on its summer workshop on solid-state lighting (SSL), held in Boston in July and co-sponsored by Northeast Energy Partnerships Inc. After a review of the DOE's SSL program and commercialization support plan, a discussion of the 2007 design competition, details on testing programs, an update on the criteria for EnergyStar labeling and an outline of plans for coming technology demonstrations, the workshop attendees separated into five breakout sessions to address five SSL case studies. The breakout groups were tasked with determining how to best market a hypothetical SSL product--four using LEDs, one based on an OLED--and recommending how the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the DOE could best help the product to attain commercial success.

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Toppan Teams for Printed Photovoltaics

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:00:00 -0700

As always with emerging technologies, it's been more than interesting lately to watch the institutional alignments developing along the line of printable electronics, and there's much more to come. This past month's addition to the ongoing drama was the announcement of a hands-across-the-water team-up between Konarka in the U.S. and Toppan Forms in Japan: the former a photovoltaic technology company, the latter a printing firm.

The Konarka-Toppan partnership is another of those classic relationships of the contemporary electronics world, with the technology of the West traveling to the East for volume manufacturing. This, in turn, gives the technology credibility for use in high-volume consumer products. As in other cases, the big brother in Asia here, Toppan Forms, also provides technology enhancement, especially in terms of manufacturability and related technologies, and it provides long-established sales relationships and channels, as well. [More]

IBM Research: No Nanotechnology Slouch

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 23:09:00 -0700

IBM's international chain of research centers has delivered more than its share of technical innovations over the years: the hard disk drive, for example, the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), high-temperature superconductivity in ceramics and the scanning tunneling microscope, to name just a few of the more memorable items. This month has been a particularly good month for IBM on the nano front, with various labs reporting a switch made up of a single molecule, a printing technique capable of laying down a single nanoparticle, and a new understanding of the magnetic behavior of individual atoms that could conceivably lead to single-atom memory bits of the future.

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Nanoimprint lithography gets into gear

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:36:00 -0700

A stamping technology developed by the Quantum Science Research operation of Hewlett-Packard Labs appears ready to start strutting its stuff out in the marketplace. Dubbed nanoimprint lithography (NIL), the technology has been used by HP to create prototype circuits with lines as narrow as 15 nanometers. This figure, according to HP, is "about one-third the dimension of the features in the most advanced circuits that will be commercially available this year."

HP licensed the NIL technology in May of this year to a startup named Nanolithosolutions, which might be considered something of an HP spinout, given that it is the recipient of HP equity funding and that one of its two cofounders is a former employee of HP Labs. Nanolithosolutions' contribution to the furtherance of the technology so far consists of a modular NIL tool for photolithographic mask- alignment equipment.

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Best of Breed in Nanotechnology: 2007

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:14:00 -0700

The Nano 50" awards for 2007 won't be presented until the National Nano Engineering Conference takes place in Boston in mid-November, but Nanotech Briefs--an on-line publication of APB International--has revealed the 50 "innovators, technologies and products" it deems to have been the most significant during the past year in forwarding the progress of nanotechnology.

The award recipients are spread across Australia Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands, but the vast majority are located in the U.S., with nineteen states and the District of Columbia all represented in the slate of winners. The intense academic involvement in nanotechnology development is reflected in awards given by the on-line magazine to individuals and technologies at twelve U.S. universities located in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Texas.

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Digital Lithography: Silicon Soon, Polymer Later

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:28:00 -0700

The ink-jet printing of thin-film circuitry for active-matrix displays has been discussed in the technical literature since at least the late 1990s, and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) has reported its progress in this area in a long string of papers tracing back to 2002.

The research center has developed a "digital lithography" technique that it is proving out for both conventional amorphous-silicon active-matrix arrays and, more recently, for arrays of polymer thin-film transistors (TFTs). The PARC technique is based on the printing of a mask structure on a substrate using a phase-change material "such as wax."

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Flexible Electronics & Displays: Sputtering Along

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:07:00 -0700

A special section in last month's Journal of the Society for Information Display provides a small window into the R&D community's continuing quest to achieve flexible electronics and displays. Compiled by self-described "flexible display enthusiast" Dr. Anna Chwang of Caliper Life Sciences, the ten technical articles in this excellent section on active-matrix arrays for flexible display applications demonstrates the diversity of the quest.

Five articles of ten are directly related to flexible substrates; three of these projects sit on a foundation of steel, the two others on plastic. The active-matrix technologies discussed in the articles represent the major silicon alternatives--amorphous silicon, polycrystalline silicon and single-crystal CMOS silicon--in addition to three approaches to organic circuitry.

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Passing the Polymer-OLED Baton

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:53:00 -0700

And so, Cambridge Display Technology is passing the polymer-OLED baton to Sumitomo Chemical in the culmination of a six-year relationship that has grown closer and closer over time. (See Speculations on the CDT Acquisition, July 31, 2007.) It seems that CDT, which has been t.h.e. hub for polymer OLED development for nearly 15 years, is finally getting the big brother (with big pockets) it has always needed, and polymer OLEDs are gaining the champion with staying power that they have sorely lacked.

Is this good news or bad news for polymer OLEDs? A good or a bad deal for Sumitomo? [More]

ILEDs: Placeholders for OLED Lamps?

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:18:00 -0700

Solid-state lighting (SSL) is making impressive inroads these days in the form of next-gen inorganic light-emitting diode (ILED) arrays, and some very innovative products are appearing. In overhead lighting applications, ILEDs are delivering comparable or better brightness than traditional technologies - at a much higher cost, of course, but also at a significant power savings and a greatly extended operating life.

As ILEDs blaze the lighting trail, however, it's hard not to see these point-light sources as placeholders for the next next-gen technology, which will be flat, printed area-light sources, based on organic LEDs (OLEDs), thick-film electroluminescent (EL) devices, field-emission devices (FEDs), or some other technology waiting in the wings. There are several reasons for this.

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